Prayer and the Power to Choose
It's a mystery.
But every once in a while, the mystery yields a clue, and in what I believe to be an answer to many months of prayer, certain thoughts drifted into my mind on Sunday's plane ride home for Lynchburg, VA that offered clues to some of the central questions of my life. As we know, the manner in which we tell the stories of our lives matter, the language and images setting parameters, boundaries that sometimes get us stuck in patterns of behavior and living that seem ordained, but are nothing more than the proverbial ruts. Retellings of those stories, with new themes and new understandings, can pave new roads, new patterns, offering new hope.
That's what I got this weekend...new hope.
God rescues us--and we must choose. It's an odd combination. To be totally dependant on God's grace and mercy, on the love of Christ, and yet still, we must choose. Every day, the choice is ours, so that we give credit and glory to God even as we take full responsibility for our lives.
The two books mingling in my thoughts are Willard's The Divine Conspiracy and Dan Baker's What Happy People Know. Each book, one from a religious perspective and the other from a secular psychological perspective, speak of the nature of "personal power." For Willard, personal power is "spirit" and he goes to great lengths to talk about the nature of spirit as it rises out of the heart, filled with the action of Christ led by God's "personal power"--the Holy Spirit. Baker talks of personal power as that animating force in our lives that we often end up giving away and losing by refusing to take both responsibility and action.
Somehow, the two ideas collided in me this weekend as I worked with a group from Virginia, and as I sat in the home of an executive pastor of a rapidly growing church there in Forest, VA, just outside of Lynchburg.
In the end, as it relates to this notion of following the Spirit of God. A paradox settled in my mind and became a living, working idea. "Tell me what to do, God." And the reply comes in a hundred ways, and given that, I must choose. "To pray and to choose" is the phrase that comes to mind. There is so much language about God and our following Him that is difficult and misleading. We wait on God, listen for His voice, linger in His presence, and in the end, stand up and choose what to believe we hear. Ambiguities are endless, but to wait there does us no good.
Somehow, it has been far too easy for me to wait, thinking the choosing of life is far too hard, too many possibilities, too many lost chances in the past, too many pains to overcome. But the sun rises, and there is a new day, and the voice of God comes again, and again, I can rise and meet it in choice, or I can not.
It's hard to explain what I mean here, but I know that today, in prayer, I am off to make the choices of my life.
Gathering up glory, giving it back...
8:01:38 AM
