Cause and Lack of Effect

An old friend called me yesterday to encourage me. In fact, he was in dire need of encouragement himself. It ended up flowing both ways and was a blessed time. One of the things we spoke of was a project he had initiated and spent a huge amount of time and effort on. This idea was something undeniably exactly in the middle of God's agenda as revealed in the New Testament. It would seem to be a no-brainer that it would be something that God would desire to be accomplished and that he would bless it - grease the rails so to speak. But the continual obstacles that have befallen the effort have come close to shutting him down. It seems this is the normal mode and not the exception. God seems to want to make sure that every such effort is of himself and we must be thoroughly convinced at the end that he accomplished it and we were mere vessels. Pride in our own doing is completely unacceptable to him. Indeed, a broad reading of scripture shows that pride is what he hates above all else. Ultimately unbroken pride is the unpardonable sin as it chooses to deny his glory and his gifts to us.

Anyway, back to our frustration. I was sharing with my friend that his experience was something with which I was very familiar. But there seems to sometimes come a time when it's not a matter of a wall to be overcome by faith. Sometimes it is a wall that stands. At least for a time. Maybe for a very long time. And we wear ourselves out physically and/or in faith trying to get past it. The only answer is to camp out in that spot and wait. Just wait. At some point, God provides a way. Or not. This makes absolutely no sense. Why would God allow failure when the goal is to obey him? To accomplish what he told us we are to be about in this life? To do something that is of no self interest and is of no direct personal benefit to us? Rather it is something that is costing us dearly? Yet the blockage stands as a personal failure.

It is a mystery. There is no answer. There is no logical explanation, really. The only thing to do is to trust God and wait on him. He has his plan and it is so very much bigger than any of us and the big picture is impossible for us to see. I am a small cog in his grand scheme. The best I can do is to be as obedient and available as I am able to be and not worry that my particular corner of the mechanism seems to have no dynamic at any given moment. Our grand ideas for contributing to the building of God's Kingdom may never budge. I may never understand why in this life. But I cannot know all that is going on. And I must be at peace with that.