A note from Kelly King: As leaders, I know many of you are glued to your calendar, your agendas, and your to-do lists. None of those are bad. I use them as well. But, as Rachel Lovingood points out today, there is a difference between asking God to bless our efforts rather than letting Him fill our days. Remember, Proverbs 16:9 says, “A person’s heart plans his way, but the LORD determines his steps.” You can hear Rachel at our upcoming You Lead event in Woodstock Georgia on September 27. For more information about this You Lead, click here.
Have you ever noticed how it can be easy sometimes to say the right things in your relationship with God, but it’s not always as easy to actually live those things out?
A few years ago I was teaching on how the Lord is sovereign and we can trust Him. It was things that most people who have been in church very long have heard about at least on some level, and God began to challenge me. (WARNING: If you teach about something, then be ready to relearn it for yourself.)
It was pretty eye opening for me, and I am so thankful for that lesson. I just wonder how many other women can relate. You see, He brought to mind the way that I was doing my schedule. I had been in the spiritual habit of laying my calendar before the Lord and asking Him to bless it. This seemed like the right thing to do because I really wanted the Lord to do something in and through me, but I was missing a very important point. God challenged me to consider what would be different if instead of asking God to bless the schedule that I had filled, I gave Him my empty calendar and asked Him to fill it.
Have you ever considered the same thing? It was a game changer for me and taught me a whole new level of trusting the sovereignty of God. So often we look back in hindsight and talk about how God orchestrated cool things, and that’s a good thing to do. But I don’t want to see the sovereignty of God only looking back; I want to be the person who trusts Him fully looking forward also.
Last year I had a pretty full travel schedule of speaking and teaching with a weird and random couple of free weeks at an odd time. Because I had been trusting God to fill my schedule, I just went with it, and of course those were the days that my dad had a very serious health situation while traveling overseas. Because I was free, I could easily step in to help my folks.
This year a similar situation showed up. I was super busy then had nothing scheduled in what is typically a very busy season for women’s ministry. Two days after I got off the last plane ride, we were in a car wreck and I spent the next eight weeks battling through some injuries that would’ve been terrible if I had to keep traveling or frustrating if I had to cancel.
Of course trusting God to fill my schedule doesn’t always mean something bad is going to happen. Sometimes He just knows better than me when I will need to rest or go visit my kids and be refreshed by family time. I can honestly say that learning to let God fill my calendar has developed my faith and trust in ways that just saying the right things and looking back at His sovereignty never did.
What are you in the habit of doing? Asking God to bless or asking God to fill? Try exercising your faith and giving the Lord your blank pages so that He can write a story you could’ve never even imagined. It’s so worth it.
Rachel has been doing ministry with her husband Jeff for 30 years and they have 5 grown children. She is an author and teacher with a knack for teaching biblical truths in a simple, fun, relevant way so that they can be applied to everyday life. Her passion is to see lives transformed by the Word of God, which happens when Scripture is applied to our lives. Rachel serves as a Women’s Ministry leader at her home church of FBC Cleveland, TN.
