When the Future Fails...

(A follow up and very personal reflection to the last posting I made)
Harv



Moses, a giant of faith, service and intimacy with God, is told after all his work leading others to the Promised Land, after all that time pursuing a God-given vision, that he would not be able to experience it personally.

Seems cruel.

Here’s a 'spiritual' thought: Is my relationship with God such that He is my promised land, more than the vision he gave me to pursue? I feel the Sunday school answer should be: “Why, yes of course”. The real answer from me sometimes sounds more like a resignation, an acknowledgement of what has come to be.  A surrender.

Personally, I need to be able to say to God, “I wish I could see and experience a fulfillment. But if this is as far as you wanted for me, I’ll accept it. I don’t like it but I’ll accept it because ultimately you know better. The work, or whatever might have been accomplished had I been the one to see its fulfillment is really your work, your accomplishment”.

Everything in my life has brought me here.

Every vision you gave me has brought me here.

Every stumble and failure has brought me here.

Here is where You are, God. Here is where You knew we’d be.

Here is where we are, together.

So Lord, help me to not despise the unfulfilled vision, or you who have not let me experience it in full. The vision is what created the journey with you. That journey was filled with intimacy, argument and mystery. Along the way, things were done as you ultimately intended. And if I never get there, wherever ‘there’ is, I know I have been on the path you laid out when you birthed the dream in me.

It’s hard though, but…

“It helps now and then, to step back and take a long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in a lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. We cannot do everything, and there is sense of liberation in realizing this. This enables us to do something and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lords grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own”

Bishop Ken Untener