Being Flexible

Who has good intentions but the way you feel can stop you?

Planning for the week, you decide midweek you are going to clean out those rooms, those closets that need it. Even the night before it was still in your plans. Then you have a bad night of lack of sleep because your brain just won’t shut down. In the morning you seem to have a sore throat, a runny nose… and when the alarm goes off you keep hitting the snooze button on the machine.

You just can’t seem to get the energy up to even get up, let alone open the closet door to clean up what’s behind it.

Sometimes your plans don’t eventuate and need to be changed. Like this day due to not feeling well.

Are you flexible in your plans, your arrangements when other people disturb your plans? When other circumstances cause you to change your plans again!

What if God had a hand in it? He wanted to stop you going somewhere, stop you doing something?

It happened to Paul the Apostle – he wanted to go to Asia but could not get a ticket to travel, or the weather stopped him. It was not that God did not want Asia to be reached for the Lord, it was just not yet in God’s timing.

Then God sent him a dream about a man calling him to come to Macedonia. And so he followed God’s leaning. And to Macedonia he went.

Are we flexible in listening to the Lord and changing our plans if it seemed like it was going that way?

Maybe God wanted me to do something else that day?

I had been pushing it a lot lately and was actually grateful for the down day. There was time of rest and reflection.

I have learnt to trust in God, His plans and promises for me – that a delay a time when things don’t seem to be happening – that’s ok. Nothing will stop what God has for me if I stay on His path. If I stay focused on Him.

If God is for us then who can be against us… he who did not spare his own son….. but delivered him up for us all.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Romans 8:31-35 NRSV

Such an appropriate scripture to read in Lent not many weeks from when we celebrate the death and resurrection of our Lord.

I know the plans God has me – ones that are good and not harmful, as stated in Jeremiah.

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

Jeremiah 29:11-14

Are there days when your plans change, and you end up spending more time with the Lord? This is what happened to me, and I was so grateful for it.

And yes, I did get the rooms cleaned at the next opportunity.

May these jottings from my journal inspire you to believe in and fall in love with Christ- the hope of the world, as stated in Jeremiah 17:7, ‘Blessed is the man who believes and trusts in and relies on the Lord and whose hope and confident expectation is the Lord!’

Love

Rosemary

Every week groups of ladies meet together to chat about the things I raise in my weekly blog post and to chat about life in general. We call these ‘Heart Connect’ groups.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

When was the last time that you didn’t feel like doing what you had planned? What did you do instead?

How flexible do you think you are in changing your plans for something else that you think God has planned instead?