Recently God has started breaking down my old, ambiguous perspective of 'finding His will'. He showed me this picture of a kid being led by their parent to the playground. There’s nobody else there; the playground is entirely the child’s terrain. Then they have this conversation:
God: “Play on whatever you want! Have fun!”
Kid: “Can I play on the swings?”
God: “Do you want to play on the swings?”
Kid: “Yeah, but can I play on the swings?"
God: "If you want too. You don't have to. But if you want to... go for it."
I think right now in the church there are people stepping into the reality of, “Hey guess what? This is my playground. I get to play on whatever I want!” By that I mean, they’re realizing that loving God doesn’t have to be tiresome, endless, to-do lists in order to earn His favour. It’s about walking in His love and in our true identity! What I see happening in the church is similar to what I am seeing in my own heart. I am starting to step into the realization that this life is my playground! I get to play on whatever I want! God is not a limiting God.
I feel a bit of a polarization in myself, as well as one happening in the world today. There are the people living the good ‘Christian life,’ where they are doing whatever they feel like they’re supposed to be doing to please God. On the other side, there are people coming to this realization that it’s so much easier than that, so much easier than going through the correct Christian motions.
Years ago, I remember sending a long email to Pastor Brant asking, “How do we find the will of God?” I know that many others besides myself have wondered the same thing. With all the longings of our hearts we have all desperately sought out ‘His will,’ as if there’s this one final answer to it. It’s as if we hope that God is going to write something in the sky one day, and then finally we will know our true purpose. As if that will make every word He’s ever spoken finally make sense to us, and then everything will just click into place. But now, I think for the people actually listening to Him, it’s so much easier than all of that…
A couple years ago was when things first started shifting from that perspective for me. During one of the FatherHeart B Schools I attended, I felt like God spoke clearly to me: "I want to take you back to who you were before the world went mad." I’m still trying to figure out what that meant, but the important part was He wanted to take me back to who I was as a kid. God had me go through this exercise of writing down everything I wanted to be when I grew up. It went back from when I was really tiny, to around the age of 10. As I did, I started seeing themes of what was actually important to me, of who I was actually made to be!
That’s what I’m stepping into now; instead of sitting around, waiting for that master plan, He’s revealing it moment by moment. The course I’m about to take is a perfect example; it’s Therapeutic Art Expression. It’s as if it was made specifically for me, but I had actually looked into the same course a few years ago and was like, “eh, no.” Back then, it almost felt too easy to step into it because it felt like something I would do naturally without even trying. Now, I am excited to step into something He has specifically made for me! That’s how I’m discovering the mystery of “His will” now. I’m simply following the things He has placed in my heart, and He continues to unfold things as I go. The cool thing is that is what’s happening in our church, too. We’re realizing we are actually created on purpose; we’re given specific unique wirings and abilities. That is actually who were supposed to be in our lives all along: ourselves!