Sometimes you have to wonder about how God sees us. We know He knows us far better than we could ever know ourselves. It's strange to say, but He has an intimacy with us that even we don't have. As we seek Him, though, He not only reveals more about Himself to us, but He shows us more about ourselves too.
One day the Lord gave me a small lesson in just that -- a little bit of what we may be like in His experience of us.
It was during winter. I didn't have a car, so I took the bus frequently. I was trying to catch one home, but had just missed the latest one. It would be another half-hour before the next one came by.
I didn't feel like just standing there at the bus stop, waiting, for an entire half-hour, so I decided that I'd walk towards home along the bus route until the next bus came along. This was the beginning of the iPhone era, but I didn't have a phone like that, so there would have been "nothing to do," to my mind, if I waited.
And a half-hour can be a very long time when you're outdoors in winter. It was certainly cold - a cold, crisp morning in a city where winter usually brings lots of snow. The sidewalks were thankfully pretty clear this day, though. All things considered, it was a much better day for walking than for standing around and letting my feet grow painfully numb from the cold.
I enjoy walking, too, so I started to think that my missing the bus was just be an unexpected opportunity that God had given me to take a walk while experiencing this fairly pleasant winter's day.
Being human, I also decided to see how far I could walk before I needed to stop at a bus stop and wait. I like to walk briskly, so I was pretty sure I'd get some self-satisfaction out of seeing how far I could get before I had to stop.
Source: Pixabay/arthurreeder
I enjoyed my brisk walk, meditating on the Lord and life while taking in the peaceful stillness of the day, the sort of stillness in the air that's unique to winter. And I was happy with my progress, with how much I felt I'd accomplished in a short period of time. I'd almost gotten halfway home, I thought. Finally after a bit I realized I'd better make sure I was at a bus stop in case the bus was early. I was actually at that moment right in between two stops, which were a few blocks apart.
While it made more sense simply to keep walking, because if the bus did come along very early for some reason, I'd be more likely to catch it at the later stop, it seemed natural to consider both choices. Still walking quickly, I immediately replied to myself that I would keep going on. I was sure I'd make the bus either way, but I just didn't want to stop and turn around. After all, I'd set a goal to see how far I could get before the bus came.
But then as I walked on, I felt the Lord telling me that He did want me to turn around and go back to the previous stop. I felt His pull on my spirit, but my body kept going on, something like a robot. It took a little time for me to come to a stop and comply. His will for me had to take over from my own.
Partly I didn't stop immediately because it took me a couple seconds just to understand the message. But partly I just didn't want to stop. I'd set my mind to something, and now I was my will in motion. There was some conflict between His will and mine, and somehow receiving His message and having to have my will brought to a stop in order to follow His will let me see how truly powerful the human will was.
Once my will had decreased and His will within me had increased enough that turned around and started to head back, I thought that He must have some reason for me doing so. I looked around expectantly to see what it might be.
Maybe I was to have an encounter with someone. But I didn't meet anyone while I retraced my steps and waited for the bus's arrival. I also looked around at everything I was seeing for a second time, inspecting it all very closely for some sort of message from the Lord - something He wanted me to know about and think about. Maybe it was something on a poster put up on a telephone poll, or even just a piece of graffiti. I mentally tried to leave no stone unturned. I took in the whole scene, the homes and businesses, the cars passing, the side streets, the curtains in windows, the sky, the cracks in the pavement. Maybe I'd just passed by something the Lord wanted me to notice. What was it?
But the bus came by soon, and I got on without getting any answer. I felt a little bit perplexed. Why would God not seem to have a purpose for commanding me to do something?
Afterward, though, I began to realize that He of course had had at least one purpose for the situation. There may have been others that I'll never know about in this life - anything from maybe someone inside a building needed to see me walk by, or the bus needing to stop at that particular stop. We know that God is sovereign over the universe and nothing can happen outside of His will. Jesus was able to tell Peter to go fishing, and to look inside the fish he caught for a coin to pay a tax for Him and His disciples. Humanly we can't know such things in this world. But I do know that through this small episode, the Lord showed me just how powerful our human will is.
When we hear about people setting seemingly impossible goals and driving themselves relentlessly to meet them, it's easy to think that the real powerful force in the matter is the goal itself, that it's such a worthy and important goal that it motivates them to go on.
But the Lord showed me that there's also the involvement of the human will, setting itself on something, deciding it will not be denied.
While God's will is infinite in size and power, and our will is virtually nothing next to His, this small incident showed me that the human will was still much larger than I thought, and huge in its own way.
If I had thought about it before, I might have pictured our human will to be something like a rowboat, easy to navigate and just as easily tossed around when the water gets choppy. Maybe that's still true to some extent, too. But this experience made me see that the human will might also be something like a massive ship that doesn't quickly stop or easily turn on a dime.
We see ourselves as small in the physical scheme of things, truly small in power next to God, and in our time and place - if we happen to live in one of the wealthier countries in the world, that is - it's easy for us to become convinced that we have little power, and to get frustrated, when things don't go our way.
We can be assured, though, that we have far more power than we usually feel that we have. It's just that we're surrounded by similarly powerful beings who often aren't working with us, and our human, personal will frequently isn't in agreement with our all-powerful God. We know what we do actually matters a great deal. If it didn't, God wouldn't hold us responsible for what we do here.
I found this lesson from God to be a profound illustration of the human will. Just setting it for something - even something very trivial, like a goal of seeing how far I could walk in 20 minutes, when I hadn't even planned to take a walk that day, engaged my human pride and need to be in control, to set my own course and stick to it. It was a trivial matter to me, but my human will was still present and powerful, and I didn't exactly abandon it immediately when God called. The momentum of my will still carried me on for a bit until I was able to turn to His.
I read a book once on the Lord's prayer that Jesus gave to us. I remember that for the verse, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven," the author pointed out that in Heaven, the Lord's will is done instantaneously. When He gives His faithful angels a command, they immediately obey.
In this world, our obedience to the Lord is still hampered by our spirit being willing, while the flesh is weak. Be we know that Jesus has made a way for us to die completely to our own selves and live in Him, so that in Heaven we'll know the joy of our will working together perfectly with His.