There is a danger in presuming we know what God is doing. I get rather weary of those people who are always telling me just what He has in mind and what He has planned for my life. I frankly find great difficulty in finding any specific leadership in the way they do. If it works for them, fine, but I have seen a great many where it did not actually work. For example, one of our young realtors has lost several million dollars in the last two or three years. Of course that doesn't make him unique but it does make him unhappy. He was telling me of his losses and I asked him, "What have you learned?" He replied, "That I can't read God's specific will like I thought could." All during the time when he was accumulating his wealth and working one deal right after the other he kept telling me God had arranged it all for him. One of the unique things about God arranging things for people is that they always talk about it in such strange terms. God always seems to be manipulating circumstances and orchestrating strange occurrences. Often these visions come to them at night, which makes me wonder if God works on the day shift. Now that my friend has lost in these deals that which he felt God was leading him into, I wonder if he assumes that God didn't know what was going to happen to the real estate market a few years down the road.
So often we in the Christian community confuse discipline and blessing. We call discipline what we don't like and blessing what we do like. However, if we'll look back on our lives we'll find that some of the disciplines that we didn't like at the time turned out to be the greatest blessings, and some of the things we counted as blessings ended up cursing us.
A young executive called me who had been out of work. He was eager to tell me that he had a job offer. Almost perfunctorily I said, "Are you going to take it?" He paused and said, "I believe I am, but first I want to get God's peace about it." I like that.
Oftentimes when I am faced with decisions I will do my homework, do all my thinking, do my research, everything that I can do in order to make an intelligent decision, and then I'll take that into a quiet place and sit down and talk to God exactly as I would talk to some wise counselor. If I get peace, then I have assurance; if I don't get peace, sometimes I have to act because of a time limitation, but I keep hoping that I will find peace.
When we presume to know what God is doing we are tempted to transfer responsibility from ourselves to others, even to God. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Traveled told me he felt transference was the second greatest sin in America .
When our grandson, Jeff, was young his Mother heard him in the front room saying repeatedly, "not my fault, not my fault, not my fault." She thought it was strange and wondered who he was talking to, so she went in and saw him lying there on the rug repeating, "not my fault, not my fault, not my fault." She asked him what he was doing. He said, "I know it won't be long before somebody blames me for something, so I am practicing." Most of us have practiced saying "not my fault" so much that we don't readily take the blame for things which are ours.
It was refreshing to see the item in the Wall Street Journal about the stockholders letter the Holly Farms Corporation management sent. Let me read you a paragraph or two:
"You already know the bad news about our past fiscal year. We were wrong about chickens. The chicken market did not recover from salmonella publicity and we entered a sharp chicken depression. We lost money in chickens, our worst year in history, and the poor performance was mostly our fault. The good news is that we know now who the enemy is: the enemy is us...we now know can see there is tremendous growth for improvement in our Holly Farms Chicken Company if we will manage it properly."
Now that is downright refreshing. There is nothing chicken about that management.
Accepting responsibility without presuming to know exactly what each step means takes courage. Creating a fantasy of knowing exactly what God is doing builds an emotional house of cards that will inevitably fall. God leads, but He isn't required to send us the trip-ticket before the journey begins.
