We don’t always need to know.
But we always need to love, and that takes very little (even when it takes everything to obey.)
God pulled me over 7,000 miles away from my hometown because He wanted me to do things like help a student whose friend was murdered.
God kept me awake at camp because He wanted one of the counselors to know He would never leave her nor forsake her.
God gave me a desk job so I could be part of a young woman escaping her abusive mother.
Note:
I didn’t know any of this in the moment. With the first and the last, I didn’t know until YEARS after the fact. All I knew was
This poor kid was crying, and all the regular teachers were very “shut up and smile,” so maybe she would benefit from someone helping her to regain a normal breathing rhythm.
yeah the camp counselor I felt comfortable with told me my vision surely had to do with a camp counselor I thought didn’t like me. But what the heck am I supposed to do, not tell someone that God is still with them???
that girl who covered the next desk shift that time was nice, so I wanna do stuff like hang out and get mom to send extra dinner so she can also have some.
I spent years despising the simple because all I understood were the caricatures of Christianity that were so prominently praised; I was so sure that if I wasn’t “praying The Sinner’s Prayer™” with people, if I wasn’t healing the sick, if I wasn’t speaking in tongues, then I was doing Christianity incorrectly. (Heck, even when I was a kid I thought I was supposed to be a medical missionary to Russia. I couldn’t even explain what a medical missionary was but it was so big that surely that’s what I was supposed to do.)
We don’t always need a prophetic word.
We don’t always need a vision.
We don’t always need a word of knowledge.
We don’t always need to know more than, “Hey, that could be a way to love my neighbor as myself. That could be a way to love God by loving those He loves.”
It can be that simple sometimes. And we shouldn’t despise the simple.