portion, practice, purpose, and everything in between

Fear of missed or under-manifested opportunity drives more of what I do than I’d like to admit. This morning I had a sliver of an unlikely opportunity presented to me, and when it, even somewhat predictably, fell through, I had to re-remind myself how to think through situations like this. It helped that I had just read this morning in Psalm 16 about the Lord as being my portion. With Him as the Determiner and Deliverer of my portion, I can slowly learn to see my portion differently. I can accept that that particular opportunity just wasn’t part of my portion for today, or for right now at all, and that is ok. It takes a lot of telling myself that and choosing to trust God as a good Giver of portion – but I can learn to trust Him in that through practice.  Later in the morning, I was reading Ruth Chou Simons’s words in her book “Now and Not Yet”… “The stories we tell ourselves about what we’re going through have a direct correlation to how we persevere, how we press on, and how we thrive in any circumstance.” If I am telling my story to myself through the lens of God’s provision and goodness, then no opportunity is a missed one – the presence or absence of an opportunity is simply my portion.

The agony I feel over missed opportunity is unfortunately, I believe, sometimes because I’m trying to craft my own life and my own story. I want it to be perfect and I don’t want to waste any time in getting it perfect. Life is just simply too short to make mistakes. I’m buying into the cultural lie that I can be self-made.

I just recently finished a different book that I will leave unnamed, written by an author who will also remain unnamed. It was good for me to read the book, and it offered me some perspective. But the entire premise of this “Christian” author’s words were founded on this refrain that kept echoing through the book “I run a company of x number of people, and I have started x number of businesses, and I did it all on my own, from nothing, from the ground up.”

Contrast that with this truth from Deuteronomy 8: “Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know that he might humble you and test you to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’” (vs. 11-17)

Take care lest you forget. When we buy into the self-made mentality, we have forgotten. This is such an incredibly humbling piece of Scripture. The real fruits of the life of the author I mentioned above are that her mentality that seems to use people as a staircase for her own success ended her marriage in divorce and a relationship with another man outside of God’s covenant of marriage.

God’s path for us to arrive somewhere is for the expressed purpose of “doing us good in the end”. My aforementioned desire to avoid wasting time getting to my perfect life (oh my, the number of impossibilities in that phrase alone) just simply does not keep the end goal actually in mind.

I believe it is absolutely possible to legitimately waste time in this life. Mindless consumption upon our own lusts abounds in this day and age, in every form imaginable. I am not exempt from this. And there are, grievously, ways that I have squandered time resources given to me by God and not turned a profit on things that I could have. That has and does happen in my life and with a feeling of much regret when I suddenly realize it is happening.

But missed opportunity is actually not necessarily wasted. In fact, it may not have been missed at all – it just simply never was an opportunity for me in the plan of God. And if it was somehow wasted, it is because God is doing something else with it. God is the ultimate recycler and He absolutely does not throw away or destroy things without bringing something else out of them in exchange. And so what I see as missed, He sees as creative building materials. “At the heart of my need to control the outcome of my current, hard-to-understand circumstances is an innate desire to avoid pain, loss, rejection, sadness, and any possible sense of worthlessness.”, Ruth writes earlier in her book (pg. 94). But God’s heart is, again, for good in the end – for Him and for me.

Along with this, however, we cannot ignore the actionable items available to us to avoid “waste” in our lives. “Trusting God doesn’t mean doing nothing,” she adds. “It means starting where you are with what you have and looking to him for the results. God desires a relationship with his children, and he is both orchestrating and inviting us to partner with him. God leads, we follow. He initiates, we respond. He gives us minds, skills, gifts, and talents; we use them as we walk in the Spirit. […] We use everything we’ve been given – time, skills, money, relationships, intelligence, emotional maturity, Bible knowledge, and more – and do all that we can to honor and partner with God. And then we trust him for the results. Trust is not passive.” (pg. 98-99)

Quite a few years ago, I was assigned a task by a difficult supervisor. The task was truly beyond me; I did not realize that at the time. I’m not sure if he did realize it and meant it to challenge me, or if he thought I was more than what I was. Either way, it resulted in several paragraphs of my creative-brain-written words with an enormous red X through them and a harsh monologue about how I clearly did not understand my place in the world or what gifts of mine were welcome toward completion of the tasks given to me. Several years after that, I was presented with another difficult task by another difficult person. The path to success in this task was even less clear than the path to success in the first, either because of my immaturity, or the nature of the task, or probably both. My supervisor in that situation added fuel to the previously kindled fire with her words, “What you have to offer is not what is needed in this situation”. Countless other people would tell me differently, but those were the words that stuck, and that was the basis I’ve operated out of for many years since. “What you have to offer does not have a place here”.

So just this past week then, I was presented with a task that looked frighteningly similar to the first one I mentioned above. Actually the ironic thing is that the task in front of me is a complete intertwining of the previous two tasks I mentioned, and all I could think of as I tried to absorb what was being asked of me was, “This is not my place. I do not have things that are needed here. And I am tired of making mistakes. So I don’t want to give myself to this task.”

In an effort to sort and begin processing through the task, I started writing paragraphs, because that is what I always do. That is how I think. But I wrote the paragraphs knowing that they didn’t have a place in this task. I wrote the paragraphs knowing (because of my past experience) that the appropriate way to present them in this present situation would be to later consolidate them into bullet points. And then I did what I have learned over time to do… I asked lots of questions, more questions than I wished I needed to ask to clarify the expectations for the task. And then I humbly asked for feedback, fully prepared to accept it without mentally building it into part of my identity; without applying feedback from one person as a full summation of who I am, as I have done in the past. In the end, I produced something that I felt comfortable met the requirements of the task. I was able to produce it by pulling together bits of previous information that I had learned in other periods of life and apply it to the current circumstance. In the very end, the task didn’t end up being super necessary or produce a lot of discussion at our meeting, because of other circumstances that had happened in the meantime.

But the fact is this – what enabled me to complete the task, and to present it well, and to handle it well even when we did not even use my work that much in the end – was the combination of all of my past failures. Every single thing that had fallen on its face in my earlier years, all of that practice had led me to a place where I could more faithfully and more maturely do what was in front of me in that particular moment. And the confidence I gained from recognizing that God’s work was in all of this, over the course of time, gives me the courage to keep doing the next thing and to keep pressing in – even when it seems fruitless, even when it seems that all I do is fail, even if the next thing ends up not being quite the right thing.

I recently started reading Hannah Anderson’s book “All That’s Good” and in the first chapter she describes some of her experiences making pies. She explained that she often made pies on Saturday afternoons for her family, and one day she decided to try some tips and tricks she had saved from a pinterest video. The video, of course, made it all look simple and easy, and she followed the instructions and stuck her pie in the oven. As the baking process went on, however, she realized that while she had followed the instructions to make it look the way she wanted, she had failed to account for all of her previous knowledge of pies in how it spent it’s time in the oven. It needed to be covered, and rotated periodically, she had learned – and in her use of new techniques to improve the appearance of the pie, she had overlooked the things she already knew about baking them in order to make the final product bake evenly and turn out how she wanted it.

A successful pie needed both what she already knew along with the new information she was learning. When we ignore or forget the learning process in our desire to just arrive at a certain type of product, as easy as the video made it look, we ultimately will not end up with what we really want or need.

Earlier in “Now and Not Yet”, Ruth writes, “[A] researcher asserted that ten thousand hours of practicing a skill with diligence does not ensure mastery of the skill. Rather, one must also have a master instructor who teachers the student how to reach his or her goal or destination. The instructor’s own mastery of the task and his or her ability to teach it is the real variable. It’s the difference between ten thousand hours of practice and ten thousand hours of effective practice, as someone who has practiced ten thousand hours “could be outplayed by someone who practiced less but had a teacher who showed them just what to focus on at a key moment in their practice regiment.” Wait, it’s not fully dependent on our ability to stay consistent and hard at work? We need someone other than ourselves to help us learn how to take our skills and abilities and hone them into fruitfulness? Sounds familiar. Luke 6:40 tells us, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Isn’t that the core of our gospel hope? That we need a Savior? That we are not the masters of our own destinies? As much as we’d love to believe that the lives we long to have someday – feeling fulfilled with our family, in our career, with our friends, or on the other side of hardship – await us if we simply put in the time, the Bible suggests the opposite. God’s Word tells us that simply working harder will never get us where we want to go and that our lives have never been fully our own to mold and manifest. We need a master teacher. And, of course, that’s the Lord himself.” (pg. 72)

Having invested time and money into piano lessons for my children over the past several years, I definitely agree with the researcher. Their excellent teacher has made all the difference in their ability to perform at an accomplished and regularly-improving level. Their success is quite dependent on their ability to practice diligently – but it is ultimately dependent on the skill, leadership, and vision of their teacher to help them multiply their efforts.

While I’m writing, Titus is sitting next to me on our flight listening to an audiobook version of “On The Far Side of the Mountain”. I haven’t read the book in a while so I know absolutely nothing about the plot line – but the titles of the chapters are intriguing me as I write these words:

“In Which A Storm Breaks.” “In Which the Population Shrinks” “In Which I Start Over” “In Which a Trade Comes My Way” “In Which I Go Backwards in Order to Go Forwards” “In Which I am In for a Surprise” “In Which I am Sent East by Northeast”

Together, those chapter titles form the story of an unexpected and likely indirect path, giving a bit of a sense of movement that is both intentional but also at the mercy of external circumstances. There is a semblance of direction, but not direct direction. Rather, somewhat of an acceptance of where the character is at and a willingness to move forward with that into an unpredictable path ahead.

Ultimately this is the story of all of us. We must be taking intentional steps forward. But we must also be holding that with the understanding that our path is planned by Someone Else. The freeing thing about that is that it is not all up to us, and we are not self-made. The scary thing about that is – pretty much that exact same thing. It’s not all up to us. We are not self-made.

There’s a Master Teacher that we are following. He has the vision, He is leading us in our circumstances, and He is growing us through each and every little thing. And so we must take every opportunity that He presents to us – indeed. But we must do so in light of His good and eternal plan. The steps we take, they can’t be out of fear of missing out, or fear of missed opportunity. They have to be from a place of knowing God, knowing how He has created us, knowing what He has done in our lives to lead us to this point, and seeking to know what He is currently doing, and knowing with certainty the bigger, grander, future plan.