Detaching
I was thinking about our business today, wondering if its inception and success were ideas/dreams/visions/promises from God or if it was conceived in the hearts and minds of my husband and me. I’m sure Abraham wondered the same things about his dreams of sons and greatness (even though the scriptures seem to communicate that there was no doubt they were promises from God, and he believed that all the way from promise to fulfillment.)
But in the pondering, and the praying I have been forced to somehow marry the idea of great faith – believing that we will succeed and overcome the obstacles before us – and submission to failure, if that is what God really wants. The goal should be to please God with our faith AND our submission, regardless of the outcome.
So this leads me to believe that I must disentangle myself from the clutches of the object of my hopes. I cannot let the dream of a successful business become the goal. Same with other types of dreams. Abraham couldn’t hang on to the hope of having a son; he had to cling to God Himself. I cannot hang on to the hope of a promise fulfilled; I must cling to God, and let Him take me wherever He desires.
So do we not ever hope for anything, or work toward a goal, or set plans? No. This is one of those mysterious unions of faith and works, of submission to the will of God and forging ahead with what we believe is promised; of free will and pre-ordination. I believe God wants both in us.
He wants us to press in and pray and then find that which we believe He is birthing in us.
But He also wants us to lay those dreams down on an altar of sacrifice, to see if we are attached to the dream or to Him.
That is exactly what took place with Abraham. I’m sure he felt like he laid his dream down over and over again in the long, long wait for a promised son. After 25 years of believing, miraculously, Isaac was born. The beloved son. The long-awaited promised one. And then, God required Abraham to kill that dream. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.
But this is what God wants of all of us. To be attached to Him, to cling to Him…not to the promises He makes to us, or the dreams He gives us. Yet He still wants us to trust Him for them.
Have we detached from the dream enough to be certain we are attached to God Himself?