Linear
“God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.”
~ Paul, to the church in Ephesus
We prefer the path of least resistance. We have been conditioned for the immediate and the quick. Everything in our lives seems to come with a tyranny of the urgent embedded. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line and all that.
Funny how that seems to be completely the opposite of how our God works.
We had someone proclaim a story from Ezekiel over us. It is the one about the temple and how water is shooting out from underneath and growing into a river. It is living water that produces lots of fruit along its’ banks and turns a dead sea into one teeming with fish. We’ve drawn a lot from those verses and their interpretation.
But even something so aspirational, organic, and life-giving doesn’t escape my desire to expedite. In my imagination, it runs down a valley in a perfectly straight line to be most efficient and reach that dead water most quickly. But our non-linear God operates very differently.
Almost every origin story of every great product or brand started while trying to create something completely different than where they found ultimate success. Making significant career shifts often lead to short-term engagements that illuminate the possibility of something even further afield. The false summit of many climbs is necessary to see the obscured higher destination.
While toiling in the obscurity of what most of us do, we all have the hidden desire to matter. To have a more considerable impact than what we are experiencing. We felt like there was a more significant and more intended for all the work we were doing—a broader audience than what we were experiencing in our local context. Our handful of coaches seemed to pale in significance to the other organizations we heard about that had hundreds of coaches.
God kept telling us that there was more. That he was protecting us and allowing us to iterate, refine, and prepare for his grander intentions. If all we ever did was to continue to service the dozens we interact with here, it would be a far greater purchase than I would have ever believed was possible, but that sense that He was up to much more in us never wavered.
His non-linear multiplication has been humbling and affirming.
One of our partners in Africa, who is aggressively moving our work forward quicker than we could have ever imagined, told us something recently that shook us to our core. He said, “SummitTrek needs to be ready to train 250 coaches in the next few years.” That’s God-sized math—certainly not our own.
He isn’t doing it in the way I thought he should. He didn’t choose the straight line I would have. It isn’t as much as I hoped or as quickly as I would have liked. It is far more than I could have hoped, guessed, or dared request.
Consider
What are you trying to “make happen” right now?
What is not happening as quickly or as significantly as you would like?
Are you open to the “far more than you could guess, request or imagine” that is available?