Renewal

I think that blogging won't get done unless I carve out 15 minutes to do it and it alone. For me, that time is 8:15am-8:45am. I want to share two stories:

1) I labored and was planning for several weeks, leading up to the Take My Life Conference (www.takemylife.org), about a large prayer tent my org was going to set up in order to help people at the conference pray for 24 hours straight. I knew that rain would prevent us from putting the tent up, and I checked the weather reports--clear skies predicted. The morning that we were set to erect the tent, clouds came and the rain poured down, so we had to scrap the tent and ask people to pray in a small enclosed prayer chapel instead. I'm not sure how many people did go there to pray, and the announcment was never made that people could pray all night. I thought about the verse in Proverbs 16--"A man plans his way, but the Lord directs His steps." The following week after the conference, I learned that our special guests, who are part of the 24-7 Prayer Movement and were helping to lead the conference...they had asked God to bring rain, as they see rain as a sign of His favor. Interesting.

2) Yesterday, I received some surprising news from a co-worker: a 2-week trip to Central Asia that he had been planning with 3 other couples has now been put on hold because the three couples said they weren't aware of the April departure time, and they weren't sure if the goals of the trip truly aligned with their own. I found this very curious just one month before the proposed trip was going to launch. My co-worker said, --"A man plans his way, but the Lord directs His steps." This time, though, in the way he applied the verse, it had the ring of an excuse for poor planning. Not that he was at fault--but someone somewhere (need to find ouut who) had failed to communicate clearly with the three couples, who we were hoping would emerge as future leaders overseas. Or else they blocked out the word "April" when they heard it and panicked when they realized February was coming to an end.

In the ministry I'm involved with, we pray a lot. We make a lot of plans. We dream. But when things go badly we may default to our ethos of being "grace-oriented" and fail to hold people responsible for what they have (or, more often, have not) done. Because God has been gracious to us, we give ourselves a lot of (too much?) leeway to continue in a failing pattern. I see it in my own life--figuratively shooting the arrow and then drawing the bullseye marking around wherever it hits. There are times when plans fail, though, and we need to show ourselves and others grace. But there are other times when we must lovingly rebuke brothers and sisters for being poor stewards and exhort them to see the areas where they can and should improve to avoid similar results later.

I'm learning a lot in my Project Management class about how to overcome the many pitfalls that come along with working alongside complex human beings (especially engineers) on projects. More on that tomorrow...