In Search of...Oppertunity

This week we began our 21 day Daniel's Fast. Also, this month our Bishop has started a series on The Shadow Mission during our Pastoral Bible Class. Over the course of the month I will write on the Bible study and share with you what has been taught. Also, I will enjoy the feed back.

However, with that idea in mind and the recent events taking place in Kenya, I want to write about two words: Opportunity and Displacement. For some reason the other day I kept say to myself, the opportunity of displacement. Now I know that this does not make any sense. I'm sure that my dear Kenyans would not see their displacement as an opportunity or our friends from New Orleans, for that matter. Being the thinker that I am, I just couldn't figure this one out. What opportunity is there in being displaced? I would ask you to help me to see the good in this notion. Displacement never brings about opportunity! It brings about hardship and pain, but never opportunity.

I beg to differ with myself. (I invite you to enter into my world of internal conflict. Many people may wonder why I'm such a good debater, here is why.) But I think I would disagree with myself in this case. While I understand that for the most part we can not see the opportunity that the violence in Kenya would bring, displacement does not always mean something that remains in the negative.

Would you like to explain yourself? Sure. Look at it like this. Each of us has a purpose given to us before our conception. But life takes us down many paths, often taking us away from our purpose. While we feel we have a right to the life we choose, we forget that as Christians we do not belong to ourselves. So our acquired passion for life that we have taken from society is our infringement on God's will for our life. Yes! We are free will beings and have a right to choose to go wrong. But when we give ourselves to God - in complete - we relinquish our ownership of forced title rights to our lives. We all know that God is the rightful owner of our lives, but we forced him off the property and took control. Do you follow me?

I'm hearing you. Continue, please. Ok. When we tell God that He can have control, often it is lip service with little action. It becomes a battle between the spiritual man and our humanity - fleshly. God then allows things to come into our lives to disrupt or displace us from our comfort zone. Of course we never like it when God displaces us from the things that we call our live. But God knows that if he does not allow things to come and move us away from the things that distract us we will never see or know our opportunities that God has in store for us.

Ok, you may have a point, but... Wait. Let me finish. As long as we stay in our will, we can never walk in the opportunity of promises being fulfilled. Opportunity is usually hindered or destroyed by disobedience or self ownership. As long as I belong to me I can not walk in His opportunity. His path and mine do not share the same coordinates. So I have a choice of freely abandoning my road for His, or subject myself to the possibility of being displaced from my normal way of life. Either way, opportunity awaits me. It's just that one brings with it more pain, hardship and all the other stuff that goes with being displaced.

Capisce (or capishe depending on your choice of spelling)? Yea, yea. But I'm not saying that I agree with you. If God displaces us, that would mean that we are out of His will and that we spend unnecessary time suffering until we yield and then choose to follow His plan. So the opportunity comes not in being displaced, but in the final surrender to God's will.

And my dear you are so right. The opportunity is in doing God's will and not ours. But if God does not allow us to be displaced we may never surrender to His will. We may find comfort in our will. Sometimes we need a little push, and displacement is that push. Of course we have a choice to stay in that uncomfortable place waring with what is right. But truth be told, eventually in that place we will become battle fatigued and give up all together - blaming God. Most people backslide because they refuse to allow God to move them from their will to His' will. They blame God for all of their pain and suffering. They refuse to simply to surrender and say, "yes Lord. What do you will?"

So, it would be ideal if we all just yielded to God's Divine will, but I know that that is not always the case. Yea, you are right about that! And I would add, that we are blessed when God cares enough to allow those things to come and disrupt our perfect world. It means that he cares enough to see us live on purpose rather than just live. We can rest a sure that if we are displaced from our world, God is right there to see us through to His place of great opportunities.