I’m a planner.
At work, as a strategic consultant, I focus on opportunities to improve organizational and programmatic plans and help bring them to reality. This focus impacts our home life as I’ve been known to analyze our meal planning process and experiment with improvements or find “growth opportunities” in my family members.
I love seeing improvement, the shift from potential to potential realized. And yet this love of growth can become a desire to control and enact MY plans when I’m not acting from a place of health and wholeness.
Part of my ongoing resurrection story is how God continues to pursue me, gently and sometimes not so gently reminding me, “Tracy, you are not in control. But I AM.”
The ideal state then is neither holding tight-gripped, trying to control every aspect of our lives and avoid every possible discomfort, nor begrudging submission with hands thrown up in defeat somehow. The abundant life is a pure, open-handed surrender and commitment to work WITH God to bring about the plans He has for us.
I see more now how us not being the ones in control, yet being invited into the co-created redemption story is the most beautiful of plans. This means everything finds its right time, place, and balance:
- A time for work and a time for rest.
- A time for planning and a time for releasing.
- A time for consistency and a time for spontaneity.
- A time for speaking out and a time for quiet reflection.
And it’s from this place of being invited off the couch but not onto the throne that we are operating in the co-creation story God has for us.
In His omniscient loving kindness, God continues to work with me, showing me my identity is not in what I do, how productive I am, or even how much growth I experience or enact. My identity is firmly planted in being His treasured daughter. From this sealed, secured identity, He asks me to go and do, willing to daily check-in and ask: God, what do you want me to know? God, what do you want me to do?
As I listen, He is faithful to speak into my life, not in the five-year strategic plans I think I want, but often in a daily whisper, discernment, verse that becomes direction for my actions and interactions.
Looking back at His direction and plans, I see the compounding of many days of obedience (not all the days — let’s be clear) and such divine growth I could never muster in my own strength; it can only be a testament of His provision — my Jehovah Jireh; His protection — my Jehovah Nissi; His direction (shepherding) — my Jehovah Raah; His peace — my Jehovah Shalom.