Fellowship can take a hike
I went hiking with a friend and it came up while we talked that God wasn’t answering his prayers. I felt that was a bad time to tell my friend that “no” was an answer. Instead, I told him that God always has a better plan than us because he can see everything that we can’t. He knows things that we’ll never know. My friend didn’t look satisfied with that response.
As we continued to hike, the terrain became so rocky and jagged that the trail we were on became very hard to see. We stopped and took our bearings. We had no idea where to go next. We could easily pick one direction over another and still have no idea which direction was the right one. We were overlooking a steep drop-off, so picking the wrong direction could have a terrible outcome. We definitely wanted to be cautious. As we looked around, we saw a tall stick poking out of the ground far away. As we looked closer, we started to understand what it was. Someone who had come before us had put up very tall wooden posts that acted as markers for us to see from far away. Every time we approached one marker, we could start to make out the location of another marker in the distance—never being able to see beyond one marker at a time.
That’s when a thought occurred to me. I told my friend, “You see that post over there? How far beyond it can you see?”
“I can’t see past it,” he said.
“But we can at least agree that’s the right direction, right?”
“Yup.”
Then I said, “So, we’re both trusting someone that we’ve never met to guide us to a location we’ve never been to. Not only that, this guide we’ve never met is only leading us part of the way before he tells us where we need to go after that.”
“I see where you’re going with this,” he replied, “but at least this person is guiding us in the direction I want to go. God is not doing that with my prayers.”
I answered, “Before we saw the first marker, we had no way of knowing which way we wanted to go. The first marker pointed us to where we needed to go, and then we decided that was where we wanted to go.”
I liked this conversation I had with my friend because it hit home for me. God takes us to where we need to be, even though many times we think we don’t want to go there. If my life reflected what God considered to be righteous even when things in my life did not go as I planned, then the results of these “backfired” plans would sometimes—but not always—result in some sort of blessing down the road. We cannot see past the first marker, but once we do it should be easier to look out for the next marker. We also can’t see all the way to the last marker, and that should be okay, too. Not getting what we pray for becomes an opportunity to thank God for having a plan that is better than ours—even though we might not know what it is. We just need to stay faithful and sometimes we need to have strength and endurance while we wait for God’s plan to unfold.
Our lives have trail markers in them, too. I might not know what is just beyond that crest, but God does. Psalm 139:3 pretty much says the same thing about God searching out my path and Jeremiah 29:11 also hits the nail on the head talking about God knowing the plans he has for me. If it weren’t for this hike with my buddy, I wouldn’t have been able to have this insight about markers in our life. Who else can we talk to about our prayer lives? Christians should be able to talk about this with each other. That’s called fellowship. It could be during a hike or over coffee. We need reflection in our lives and we need to be challenged in a loving way with people who stand by our side and see life the same way we do. I value these moments of fellowship with my friend. We were able to share a good adventure and have a good conversation.
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