Written and delivered at the weekly staff meeting for Faith In Practice.

When I look at the days of my life in this season, I see many whirlwind days - days filled with too much busyness and weariness, and all too often, discontentment because of a lack of surrender to God as my Shepherd and Planner of my days.

I don’t know if you can relate to this. On days when there is not much activity, it is easy to be “full of joy for the Lord” and let the Holy Spirit guide us to do what is loving and right. But in the storm, when stress levels are amped up because something in our day did not go the way we envisioned it, I find  cannot help but grumble, even if it’s just inwardly. In those moments, there is a desire to grab the pen from God, so to speak, because given the power to completely control our days, we would much prefer a day full of manageable problems, constant progress, and pleasant, ego-boosting interactions with others.

Looking at the lives that are recorded in the Bible, we see that God writes the lives of those who serve Him with a bit more variation and vividness. In this broken world, until Christ returns, our lives as people who live to serve others are prone to be more painful and wonderful than the lives of comfort that our flesh would naturally want.

Intellectually, we know God is good and in control, but in our daily walk, it is hard to really surrender that control. I find this to be especially true when my conception of who it is that we’re surrendering our lives to, is hazy. It occurred to me the other day that while I spend a lot of time talking to God through prayer, asking him for such and such things, and to help so and so, that I don’t know a lot about this God that I pray to. It is good to be reminded because we can forget who it is, this God that we pray to. As this excerpt from Psalm 145 tells us, God is not only our savior and creator, but he is also our powerful Lord, holy and loving, an ever-present shaper of our lives.