Recently though, God has really been teaching me to live every day expectant of what he has in store: to be expectant during the mundane, day-to-day happenings in my life along with those times when I can see him everywhere.
I thought I had my life at least a little bit figured out. I thought I knew what career I wanted to pursue and the kind of person I wanted to be when I grew up, how many kids I wanted to have and at times, even, who I was going to marry. This past year has been a year of transition and a year of planning as I left high school life and moved up to college life. It was a year of looking toward the future and it seemed that by the time I entered college, I had to have everything figured out. I knew in my head that I had a few years to decide my major and what I would do after college but it seemed that if I didn’t have it figured out now that I would be wasting a bunch of time in college. I was so uptight about trying to figure out my life and my future.
God began to break me of that this past semester. It was a long and hard process with a lot of crying, questioning and searching, but oh am I better because of it! God completely rocked my world and turned it upside down over these past few months. He showed me that I don’t need to have my life planned out and He knew I wasn’t going to be the only one to struggle with worrying about my future.
In Matthew 6:34 He says “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” I honestly took that verse as “don’t worry about tomorrow,” but it honestly never hit me until recently that I wasn’t supposed to worry about the future as a whole or try and plan for the future. I tried that and it took a lot of brokenness to get my heart back to a place where I was looking to God for my future plans. I really love how Matthew 6:34 reads in The Message.
"Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”
Give your ENTIRE attention to what God is doing RIGHT NOW, not what he was doing yesterday, not what you think he is going to do ten years down the road or even two days down the road. When our entire focus is on God in this moment, He can move in mighty ways. Our world has perverted the way we think and programmed us to look to the future as the only exciting thing, the only thing worth looking forward too. God has showed me that the here and now is exciting too, that he has so much to show me and those around me right now if we would just open our eyes and be intent on keeping our gaze on him each moment, through the mundane and the extra exciting.
Train yourself to give your full attention to God but also, don’t settle for what our little minds can conjure up for our future. God has plans in mind for you that are so much bigger than you could ever dream. We often settle for our plans and ask God to bless those plans when Proverbs 16:3 says to “commit your WORK to the Lord and your PLANS will be established.” Too often we find ourselves reversing that verse: we commit all of our plans to him and then ask him to bless them. What we should be doing is committing everything we do to the Lord so that He can have full range to establish the plans for our life because we know that those plans will be the best for us. Our all-knowing God wants to bless us. We just have to learn to let him.
Be EXPECTANT of what God is going to do in your life. Keep your eyes pealed for signs of Him. Expect him to show up in those parts of your life that you see as mundane and ordinary. When you are expectant of God, He is going to show up: he rewards those who earnestly seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). Search after God in earnest. Let him guide you. Let him guide your future. Let him be your God. Be expectant of what He has in store.
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