Inferred

 If you are seeking direction with a sincere and contrite heart, the answer will come. God doesn’t like to keep His children in the dark, nor does He desire to make you guess at something just to see if you guess right. Knowing that the answer will arrive, the only thing we need to concern ourselves with is the means of delivery. It’s not a question of whether God will direct us, guide us, and show us how we must go; it’s a question of how.

Thus far, we’ve discovered that He uses the Word to guide and direct, He uses the Holy Spirit, and to this list, we can add His use of circumstances and situations that seem to lead us in a particular direction. Not every open door is one you should walk through and not every closed door should be bypassed. When God makes a way, you will know. When He’s attempting to block your path, you will likewise know. Perhaps not at first, but eventually, you will get the message that this isn’t something God wants for you, and that’s when you will have to choose between trying to push through, wriggle around the plan of God, and finding a bypass, or submit to His will.

When we are walking in God’s will, things seem seamless. Things we might have previously categorized as chance encounters or serendipity are seen for what they are; the plan of God. Thinking back, all of us have had those sorts of experiences, what we presumed was accidentally meeting someone on a plane that ended up being a contact in a country you were going to minister to months later. It’s those little things that one can’t plan for. Those moments, encounters, and situations that could not have been coordinated by anyone else other than God. Those one-in-a-billion events that steer you in a particular direction, the ripple effects of which go on and on throughout your life.

The defining moments in your life are God ordained. They are not something that happens by chance. The first time I saw my wife, she was sitting on a park bench eating a pretzel. I was driving to my mother’s house, had just taken a right on her street, and there was this beautiful girl picking at a pretzel. Had I driven by five minutes earlier, I would not have seen her. Had I picked a different time of the day to visit my mom, we’d never have caught sight of each other.

I didn’t start my morning thinking this would be the day I met the love of my life and the future mother of my children. It wasn’t on the schedule. I couldn’t have made it happen even if I’d wanted to. God did it with no problem.

Don’t let your plans get in the way of God’s direction. They’re not on the same level; they’re not on par with each other. To think that following your plan or following His plan, you will ultimately arrive at the same destination is a fallacy many embrace because they’re unwilling to admit that their rebellion cost them more than they could quantify.

Proverbs 16:9, “A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.”

We must allow for the possibility that the plans of our hearts and God’s plans for us will diverge at some point. Let’s face it; it’s not just a possibility or a probability. It’s a certainty. If His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts, then It stands to reason that our plans are not His plans.

I wanted to be an archeologist when I grew up. During my teenage years, I spent all the money I had saved on metal detectors, digging tools, and all kinds of equipment, telling myself that I’d fill my time with treasure hunting until I had enough saved to go to college and major in archeology. No, I hadn’t seen Indiana Jones, and yes, I knew there was a difference between treasure hunting and archeology.

The most I ever found were arrowheads, sword tips, and a handful of coins of little value while metal detecting around castles in Romania. It didn’t matter to me that they had no monetary value; I’d still spend days on end roaming the foothills and countryside, digging in the dirt, and bringing up things long abandoned or forgotten.

That was my plan for my life: To dig in the dirt and reintroduce long-forgotten relics back into the world. It was a simple plan for a simple life well lived, neither unrealistic nor unachievable.  God had other plans, and eventually, I ended up at a crossroads, having to decide whether I would follow His plans or my own. That’s as complicated as it gets. You have your plans, God has His plans for you, and you can choose which you will follow.

It’s not that you stop wondering what could have been once you surrender to God’s plan for your life; you just know that whatever could have been would not have been as fulfilling and altogether good as what is. Perhaps not in the moment, perhaps not within a year or a decade, but we all come to acknowledge, though often grudgingly, that God’s plans are superior to anything we could have hashed out on a vision board. I don’t have a vision board, but I hear it’s the newest thing that enables perpetual procrastination.

God will direct your steps if you allow yourself to be directed. He will guide you if you allow yourself to be guided. Wrestling with God at every turn gets tiresome for you and for Him. Hardened clay gets cast aside. Malleable clay is formed into something beautiful by the potter’s hands. You decide which you want to be.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.