God's Plan is Different Then Ours

Right now I'm re-reading The Making of a Leader by Clinton. The book is all about the process that God uses to develop leaders. Clinton has studied thousands of Christian leaders, both living and dead, and discovered that there is a framework that it appears that God uses to mold all of them, and thus, all of us.

I think one of the most striking things about this process is that a major phase, Clinton calls it Ministry Maturing is all about God using things in a leaders life (circumstances, other people, challenges, etc.) to grow the leader's internal character. Often times the leader believes that God wants them to focus on learning things, when in actuality God is most interested in building one thing into the leaders life - Christ in them.

I think we all fall into this trap. We think that God wants us to do something — and it's not that God doesn't want us to do something — it's just that He is more interested in doing something inside of us rather then us doing something for Him. I've heard this referred to as the process rather then the goal. God is process oriented, not goal oriented. His time horizon and perspective is so much larger then ours that He is much more aware of where things are headed then what is happening right now. All we can see is the next "goal", but He has so much more in view that the "goal" is much less important to Him as an individual piece.

So in all of this, the thing to remember is that God wants to use all the things that are going on in our life, to form us on the inside. The conflict we are experiencing, the person in our life that rubs us the wrong way, the challenge at work, the struggle with the car — all are tools in God's hand to make us in the image of Christ. But we must allow Him to work inside of us, we must seek to learn the lesson, or we will repeat it over and over again until we finally figure out - it's not about the thing, it's about what He's doing through the thing.