THE MYSTERY OF IT ALL

Mystery! I love it and I hate it, all at the same time. I love the adventure and the romance of it, but I hate the fact that I can neither control it or fully understand it. It weaves it's way into our personal lives and relationships and also into the life of our churches. As a leader it's hard to understand what you did wrong when nothing seems to be happening spiritually, and you wonder what you're doing right when things are going well. Over the last few weeks in the church meetings here we've sensed the presence of God among us in an almost tangible way. The worship has probably been the best I've ever experienced, the gifts of the Spirit have been unusually accurate, people have been getting saved at almost every meeting, many others have come forward for water baptism, passionate times of Bible study, genuine love & fellowship between us all. My problem is, I don't understand why it's happening now, and I do like to be able to understand what's going on around me.

I'd love to be able to say that we've been doing deep battle in prayer recently, or that we've started to do a lot of fasting, or tried out new forms of evangelism. The truth is, we've been praying the way we've always been praying, no more no less, no extra fasting or evangelism or anything like that. And, when I remember the times that we did do a lot of prayer & fasting, or extra evangelism and so on, nothing seemed to happen.

So....either there's some kind of delayed reaction thing going on, or the Lord is overriding our time schedules, or maybe it's all to do with seasons. Seasons that are covered by the Grace & Mercy of God, far above our human thinking and endeavors. Seasons of salvation, and of testing. Seasons of trials and of blessing. Times when God speaks and times when it seems He's silent. Times of healing and times of pain. Just like the Book says.

It's great to see this happening all around us, and part of me loves the Mystery of not really knowing why. But the control freak in me just has no hope at all of having anything to do with this. "Let Go and Let God" used to be a very cheesy slogan used a lot in the 80's, but I think I'm finally beginning to see just how true the cheesy slogan is.