Although it may sound a little cheesy, the truth is that the most beautiful rainbows often find their full glow after the most tumultuous storms. Here is a less cheesy and more vulgar illustration, have you ever noticed that while feeling really horrible at your stomach, if you actually ‘get sick’ things seem to feel significantly better for a bit? I didn’t want to leave anyone out… whether a rainbow watcher or someone intimately familiar with nausea, you get the idea.
However, I’ve come to find that I miss out on so much of what God wants to teach me if I am consumed with the season of struggle coming to an end. God does not only want to work through our hindsight – although that is one aspect of the way He works.
Are you pursuing what God is doing in the middle of your storm?
God is actively at work everyday of our lives, whether we are leaning into it or not. Truly believing this reality will change the way that we think about our current season of life regardless of the climate.
This is a place in which I have found recent growth. I have found myself, in the past, thinking about how I would see God’s work through a current crisis only at the hindsight of its conclusion. In my head it may have sounded something like, “I wonder how God is going to use this when it is all over?”
This type of thinking is not all wrong. At the same time, it does miss out on so much of the growth that is possible in a given season of our life. This mindset creates a ‘hunkered down’ type of response to difficulty. We, in turn, think that we just need to weather the storm so that we can see how God desires to work through it after it is over.
What if instead of praying for immediate deliverance, we began pursuing what God is doing in our hearts right in the middle of the storm?
Even further, what if our prayer was that God would NOT deliver us from our current circumstances until we have fully come to embrace the change He desires to bring in our hearts and lives?
Our recent teaching series, Beauty, at Crossings Community Church has reminded me of the way that God has worked in and through every circumstance throughout history. The same is true in my own life.
I’m asking that God would give me a heart that desires transformation over deliverance. I know that God changes our hearts through prayer. Therefore, the way I am praying is changing.
What if you began to value God-wrought change in your life above and beyond the deliverance from difficult circumstances?
Matt Powell serves as teaching pastor at Crossings Community Church, a body of believers whose mission is to engage, equip, and empower homes for gospel transformation in Katy, TX.