As I mentioned in the last Being Available to God post (which you can read here), God has been doing BIG things in my life. The key to God doing what He wants in my life is being available to God—making myself available. Of course, I didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Here I am. God use me.” I didn’t just clear my schedule and wait for God to show up.
Rather, the steps toward my availability were a work-in-progress. They started on the day I was six months pregnant and accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. I like to look at that as Day One.
In those nineteen years from then to now, I’ve learned a lot.
#1 The first thing I learned about being available to God is sometimes being available means stepping away from status quo. For me, that meant moving a thousand miles away—seriously, a thousand miles.
You see, after I gave my heart to the Lord, I birthed a beautiful son. Not too long later, God gave me an amazing, Christian husband and two more children. Then He asked us to move . . . (in a roundabout way).
First, God put us into a community of like-minded people. Our friends longed for simple lives away from the hurry and worry in California.
Next, He placed a desire in our hearts to raise our children in a better place—namely, Montana. We’d talked about it with our friends, dreamt about it, and hoped that someday it would come true.
Then we decided to pray. My husband and I got on our knees and prayed that IF it was God’s desire He would make it clear. John had just graduated from college, and I was raising three small children under the age of five.
We knew we’d be leaving our families, leaving our friends, and leaving everything we knew. We had no jobs in Montana and no money to move; in fact we’d never even been there before! Still, we had a desire, one we couldn’t shake.
At the time, my husband sold computers on commission in a small store. He’d usually sell one to two a week. He went to work the next day after our joint prayer and sold eleven computers! It was enough to pay our current bills and enough to move and live on. It was the confirmation we’d been looking for.
So we did it. We packed up our three kids and moved. Our families thought we were crazy. They were sure we were joining a commune or something. We saw Kalispell for the first time as we drove in with our stuff. Within one week we were renting a house. Within three weeks, my husband had a far better job than he had in California. Within six months we’d purchased our first house. Within one year we were plugged into an amazing church and ministering to children in ways we’d always dreamed of.
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| Kalispell, Montana (image via Kalispell.com) |
That was lesson #1. We serve a BIG God with BIG dreams.
You have to believe this. If you don’t believe in a BIG God with BIG dreams, there’s no use being available. But when you trust that fact—trust God completely and trust His dreams—THEN you can also trust Him to lead you to the right path.
Seeing God at work, seeing what He did with our lives when we were available made me hungry for more. I wanted to experience God at work like that again.
Henry and Mel Blackaby say, “Watching the activity of God from a distance can never compare with the thrill of being full involved in the Spirit’s active work.”
You have to want God, not want to work for Him or simply learn about Him. You have to want Him. You have to have a desire to experience Him at work in your life. You have to be hungry for what only He can give—a hope and a future.
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