He Didn’t Ask For Grapes

I’m not in a great place right now. I feel like I’m failing, or stagnant, or regressing in almost every area of my life. I try to focus on what I do have, and what is going right, attempting to model the gratitude and unconditional joy in the Lord that Christians are commanded to. But it feels like I’m grasping at straws.

I pray that I’m in a refining period. But the truth is, I thought I already went through one. I thought and hoped it was coming to an end. 

I know that none of us are promised easy lives, and I think that’s why I have a tendency to panic. I wonder if the way I feel right now is the way I’ll feel forever, and it’s just my cross to bear. 

Financially, physically, socially, romantically, and even spiritually, things just aren’t going the way I think they should.

I know that what I think, feel or wish isn’t what actually matters because anything that comes from the human heart is fallible. I know that real truth, love and contentment are only found in Christ. So I try to keep my mind and emotions in check.

Objectively, I know the Lord has done so much for me. He gave me a job after I was laid off. He showed me real friendship after being surrounded by shallow insincerity. And He revealed His infinite and fierce affection for me in protecting me from what I thought I wanted.

I tried not to forget all that He’d done for me because of what He hadn’t.

But as intent as I was to concentrate on His blessings, I felt myself buckling under the weight of what seemed out of reach. It was like my body was shutting down limb by limb, but I was trying to thank God because I could still see, hear and speak. 

Of course, I should be grateful for what I was left with. But it felt impossible to stop thinking about what I’d lost.

I didn’t want to be like an Israelite in the wilderness, forgetting His grace almost as quickly as I’d received it. But the more I’ve grown in my walk with the Lord, the clearer it’s become that at some point in our lives, we’ll all be wandering Israelites.

We’ll all doubt, we’ll all complain and we’ll all ignore instructions that He made crystal clear.

We’ll look at our circumstances, exhausted, confused and afraid, and forget that the same God that took us out of Egypt brought us where we are today.

But as I contemplate God’s people roaming through no man’s land, it makes no sense that He would deliver them from Egypt just to abandon them in a wasteland. 

So did I have a real reason to presume God had brought me this far just to leave me here?

It’s easy to mock the Israelites in hindsight, and wonder how they could have wavered in their belief or obedience after all they’d seen. But we’re just as weak, just as foolish and just as stubborn as they were. 

I don’t think God gave us these accounts of their lost years for entertainment value, or so we knew it happened. I’m convinced that these stories are included in the Bible, at least in part, because they hold up a mirror to the modern Christian. 

God repeatedly rescues us, redeems us and restores us when all hope seems lost, and still, we struggle to trust Him. We look at our current conditions, feel incapable of conquering them, and are overcome with fear. So we turn to despair, we turn to idols and we turn every which way but towards heaven, because we can’t see a way out, so we assume God doesn’t either.

But God has never needed a perfect setting to perform wonders. 

It’s kind of the whole point, and always has been.

This is the same God that used an unwed virgin to bring the Savior of mankind into the world, sent her on a long, dangerous trek being hunted by Herod, and had her give birth in a barn. If He could work through all that chaos and controversy to bring us the Messiah, imagine how much more manageable your mess is to Him.

Lately, I’ve been fixated on Jesus’s first miracle, and how when He made wine at that wedding, He didn’t ask for grapes; He asked for water.

He made it without the ingredients, the tools or technology we need.

What was impossible to us He did discreetly, in an instant and without a second thought.

In His first display of divine power, He made merriment from the mundane. He made abundance from absence. He made something from nothing.

And He’s never stopped.

So much of our fear and anxiety about the future comes from imposing our limits on God, and I think that has something to do with why He tells us to lean not on our own understanding.

I don’t think it’s because He doesn’t care about what we’re going through or how it affects us, but because we will never know how to turn a rock into water, how to turn water into wine, or how to make manna fall from heaven.

And we may not know how we’re going to survive the death of a loved one, rebound from a professional setback, or recover from a blindsiding betrayal.

But God does.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we sit idly, twiddling our thumbs, waiting for God’s intervention while doing nothing to help ourselves.

If you have a goal, you should take every practical step you can to reach it.

You need to act. You need to try. You need to pray.

But most importantly, you need to have faith that God is with you and has a plan for your life, even when you can’t make sense of it or see a way forward.

Like I said, I’m not in a great place right now. And as I write this, full surrender to the Lord is much more easily said than done. I don’t know how to fix this, so even though I know He can, it’s hard for me to imagine He will or even wants to.

But I know that God is good, and maybe that has to be enough for now.

I don’t know what my promised land looks like, or how long it will take me to get there. But I know Who brought me this far, and I know Who’ll bring me to it.