So yesterday I wrote about my struggle with a guy at work, and how the Holy Spirit is telling me that He is trying to use him to teach me something. What, I don't know yet, but I know on the other side of the offense is some treasure from heaven. This example of real life did not begin with the new job. It started long before.
If you were to go back to the beginning of this blog and follow it all the way forward you should be able to see the progression and daily walk with God. All designed by God with the point of my shameless surrender so that we might know Christ more. It is in this surrender that God has demanded that I seek His face, never His hand. Where life is becoming all about fellowship and relationship to Christ and the Father. Out of which obedience is spawned and life becomes about His desires and not my own.
In that fellowship over the weeks and the months God spoke to my heart and told me that He was going to bring me a job. I was thinking something in a church, perhaps some itenerary preaching, coaching... anything spiritual. Loosing patience I applied for well over 300 jobs, none of which panned out. It was on my way to an interview I arranged that my cell phone rang and the gentleman on the other end had stumbled across my information and wanted to interview me. So I agreed. On hanging up the phone God spoke to my heart again and said, "that's the job, take it."
Now mind you, this is a job in the mortgage industry that I with all my heart do not want to be in. Secondly, His spirit was telling me to take a job I had not been offered, and in an office I had not seen, to work for someone I had not met. All of which led to yesterday's post.
God in brief moments graciously allows me to hear His voice from time to time. To have a sense of where He wants to fellowship with me. I don't know why, or what it might lead to, but as I try to obey, the occasional success allows an incredible connection to Him in my spirit.
My life may not look like much to the world, but Jesus and me are growing closer everyday. Even this morning I felt a huge smile from heaven as I thought about my lunch with Mr Unlovable No. 2.
I didn't learn much about how he ticks, but I did learn that at 40 something, he has never been married though wants desperately to marry the right person. I learned that all he has in this world for family is a local brother, a sister that lives in England, and an uncle. That on the holidays his brother works so he never spends time with him then. His parents are both gone after 35 years of marriage.
Most importantly I learned that inside him is a story. As I draw it out I already know that it will impact me just like Lilly's, Greg's, and Robert's stories have.
This is real life. This is walking with God in the mundane world of the American workforce. And it is beautiful.
And in His ever love God confirms this passage with something I just read. T Austin-Sparks wrote, "Go back to the place where, for the time being, the Lord has put you, where He has called you to live your life and do your work in all the trial and difficulty and suffering of it, and do not strain to get out of it. Do not lose the present value of it by always living mentally or hopefully in a time when you will be out of it, but go back there and recognize that if you are the Lord's, if you love God and are called according to purpose (as you are if you are in Christ), God is seeking to do something with you and in you by means of the conditions of your present situation. You will only defeat God's end if you try to get out, and will fail to recognize and accept what He is seeking to do... we must go back to the sphere and conditions in which the Lord has placed us, with this attitude — God has a thought which relates to me as one of His Own; and that thought is, that through the conditions and sufferings of my life He should develop in me the features of His Son. On the one hand, the features of the old creation may be seen to be more and more terrible and horrible, as I recognize them in myself; but over against that God is doing something which is other than myself, not me at all. He is bringing into being Another, altogether other, and that is His Son. Slowly, all too slowly; nevertheless something is happening. That son-ship is not very much manifested yet, but it is going to be manifested. What God has been doing will come out into the light eventually — conformity to the image of His Son; "that He might be the firstborn among many brethren." So we look out upon the people of God on the earth amongst whom we are included, and we have to adjust our ideas as to why we are here. There may be things to do, but God is far more concerned with the being than with the doing, and we have to learn all over again what service is."
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