“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.”
Proverbs 3:5-6, NLT
I was sitting around with a group of friends, talking about our lives and how we’d gotten to where we were when one friend declared, “This is definitely not what I had in mind when I made my big plans to live the ‘good life’!”
Many of us develop big dreams of what we’d like our lives to be in the future.
But how often do we look back on those great dreams and have to admit, that for whatever reason, they’d never come true? I mean, when was the last time you looked at your life and said, “I’m doing exactly everything that I’ve ever hoped, wished for, and dreamed of doing”? If you’re like me, the answer is…never!
Generally, we can stand to relinquish some dreams without much regret. But what do we do about those unrealized dreams for which we simply have a very difficult time letting go? Maybe we missed out on having a spouse, child, or children. Maybe we longed for but never received a certain education, career, retirement, house, or car. Maybe we lost a marriage, friends, or family member too soon to bring closure to the relationship. Perhaps, we even think that we found out about God’s love and grace too late in life to really do something useful about it. Have we simply missed out on our opportunity for the ‘good life’? Has God let us down by refusing to honor our dreams? Read today’s Dose verse.
Often, our ‘big plans’ don’t take into consideration God’s will for our lives. We envision what we’d like due to our own interests, passions, and knowledge. We don’t realize or we forget that, our knowledge is limited and our truth is not God’s truth. When our plans aren’t realized, we don’t understand and we can become discontented. But take heart, my friend, God has not abandoned you or allowed you to miss out. He has the ultimate good life planned just for you!
The Lord will lead us on the correct route in life so long as we place our trust in him instead of ourselves. Placing God as number one means readjusting our will and life to his. Then, our dreams will move in line with His plans for our life. Yielding to his leadership is often a humbling experience but it’s our one and only shot to have a truly ‘good life’. Don’t you want that promise over anything that we can dream up? It’s not too late. Why won’t you trust Him today?
By grace through faith,
Rita
In this verse, we see Jesus essentially instructing His disciples to rid themselves of all unnecessary baggage and to stay focused on the task at hand. It was customary for travelers during those days to stop and converse at length with those they encountered along their journey. It wasn’t our Lord’s intention to teach His disciples to be uncourteous or rude, but to encourage them to avoid anything that would hinder or slow their mission. They were to treat their work with the utmost importance even if that meant forgoing common civilities.
God freed the Israelites from captivity, but the enemy was relentless. Pharoah was in hot pursuit and threatened to return them to a place of bondage.