Proofs

Last week I got to give a test on dental hygiene to a girl in Elizabeth’s second grade class who was absent the day the text was given in class. She aced it. And I (even after correcting the other kids tests the night before) still second guessed the correct answers and had to again check the answer key. I have found myself with this thought a lot the past couple of months…”geez, if I only remembered half of what I learned in elementary school…” I thought it as I corrected tests on bones or heard the kids describe the water cycle. I have thought about it as I have heard kids name the capitals of countries that I didn’t even know existed. And I wonder, is all that information there deep in the recesses of my mind and if there were a way to tap into it would I do better at Trivial Pursuit or beat my friends at Scrabble?

Then today I was reminded that I actually once was a whiz in math—especially geometry. I remembered this as I was journaling about what the heck I am going to do with my life when I graduate. As my time in Africa is coming closer to an end, I have been giving more and more thought to what is next. Different ideas have popped into my head…pastoring a church overseas, going back on Young Life staff, figuring out what I would have to do to live on the beach in the Dominican Republic…and while many of the options seem viable and even desirable, they usually come attached with the conditional statement I mastered in geometry:

“If (fill-in-the-blank), THEN…(fill-in-the-blank).”

The difference is that now they tend to be more directed to God than to a math teacher. As in, “If you want me to live here, then all of my friends need to live there too.” Or, “if I am to live overseas, then I want it to be a place where people can easily come visit.” Or, “if you want me to be a pastor of a church, then I want the church to have such and such qualities.”

The thing is, I'm not so sure God is in the bartering business. Not that I don’t think God wants us to make it known what we desire. I definitely think he wants us to voice our desires. Yesterday I had the opportunity to be with some amazing Young Life International folks and in one conversation was reminded that God, while maybe not in the bartering business, does have some clear promises for us. One of them being “If you delight in me, I will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). I think this thought is often misunderstood. We may try to make it a converse conditional ("if God gives me my desires, then I will delight in him) or we may not understand that God's desires will actually become our desires. I am not sure there is geometrical way of explaining how this happens. But I guess sometimes you just need to lean into the promises before they are fully proven.