June 25, 2008
Perfectly Timed
I recently returned from a conference where I campaigned for a seat on an executive board. The day before the election there was a ‘meet the candidate’ forum where I was to give a three minute speech. I had practiced my speech to the point that the timing, humor and pacing were perfect. Arriving early at the meeting I overheard staff talking to one another about each candidate having two minutes to speak. With a cranky attitude running across my face and an edge in my voice, I asked what they intended to do with those of us who had prepared for three minutes as we were told to do. “Well, you’ll just have to cut it down. Don’t worry about it. Just tell us a little bit about yourself.” I went for a short walk to collect myself before cutting the jewels out of my speech. I then went to apologize to the staff person for letting my frustration ooze onto the situation. After the speech I received a lot of positive feed back and with effort, I resisted the urge to tell people about the minute they missed. The following day during the election I garnered the most votes in my category…even beating out incumbents. Leave it to God to successfully pull off a three minute speech in less than two minutes.
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Gail;
-----I am finding the major contributor to my occasional discontentment and various stumbling is an arrogant attempt to stick to my plans. They don’t always work out. And stepping onto a piece of uncharted territory and shoot from the hip a little when you have to abandon a plan is unsettling. But two assurances in the Word have helped me to work on a better attitude, and I hope it will become a bigger part of my thinking in the future.
-----“A man’s mind plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.” (Prov. 16:9) A planned way involves a specific direction and all the turns and stops along the way. It even involves the timing. But the steps are the individual motions that propel one towards his objective. Thank God that He directs them, for they are involved in a level of detail that is beyond the abilities of a plan. And although most of the steps fall into familiar conditions that we almost instinctively know how to handle, some of them fall into the wholly unknown.
-----”Come, now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain,’ whereas you do not know about tomorrow…Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this and that.’” (James 4:13-15) Sometimes our plans themselves are not going to fit into what God knows will soon be happening. This is kind of what you experienced. It makes a person feel like he has just been made insignificant and thrown out of control. And in a sense of reality, he is both. So it is ok to accept the wash out of a plan.
-----I try to think more often about how God’s control is effected in my life. I rejected long ago the proposition that He moves and inspires me in every action, thought, and feeling, like I was some kind of petty robot. I tend to believe God gives me responsibility for making plans, and that He even expects me to make them and strive to accomplish them. But He also needs me to maintain a proper amount of flexibility towards the altering of those plans, because only He knows the details of history my plans must play into before they happen. His nature makes that accrue to my good at times, and to His needs always. And, as you noticed with your trimmed down speech, often, the change up in the details work so well with the preparation according to the plan that His involvement can be clearly seen by the success of the final product.
Love,
Steve Corey
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