Dear God,
Honestly, I haven’t always made the best choices. A lot of times my choices were steeped in fear. I chose out of what I knew I could handle, not what I knew You could do. I chose it because I thought this was all there could be and not what You could make happen. I realize there is power in changing your mind. Not flip-flopping but decisive redirecting once you realize the course you’re on is not taking you where you want to go. Lord, be our guide and lead us again. Love, Grace So, I think I’ve made it pretty clear through my blogs that I have trouble making choices. Something I’ve realized by making a bunch of choices is that a lot of times the choice has to undergo redirection. You don’t know that until you’re in the midst of it usually. For example, when I’m traveling with my handy dandy Google Maps it’s not always clear the direction I should go. I’m not direction savvy, and so I have to walk a bit in either direction first before I get a clue on if I’m getting further or closer to the delicious udon place I’m trying to go to (for example). I watch as my little blue dot that represents me moves toward the highlighted route or not. From there, I make a choice to keep going on the chosen route or turn 180 degrees and go back the other way. Sometimes I am forced to make the 180. There’s a blocked road. There’s a dead end. There’s a group of men I don’t feel like walking by. It’s good to make the turn sooner rather than later. I can be stubborn with my initial choice. I want to be right! Yet, the only thing that would do is bring me away from my intended destination. The importance of pivoting is seen clearly in the biblical concept of repentance. My Bible devotional explains it very well: I think there’s a stigma on changing your mind. Being decisive is a great quality. I could really grow in that area, but I realize that there’s a humility in not being sure and making your best shot in the dark. It’s not going in blind either. It’s active decision making that considers ourselves, others, and above anything and anyone: God. We can still get it wrong, but here intention matters. It really does. God counts it all. I don’t know how it impacts things in the grand scheme, but I have faith that God counts that I tried my best and failure to succeed doesn’t mean failure to seek God. The change of direction is good when applied correctly. I’ve had to come to terms with the rerouting my life has taken from my own plans. I see the goodness in the way I’m heading towards, and I think that’s the beauty of every path we take. There’s good and beauty if we decide to see how God sees it. I grieve with anyone who has had to grapple with unforeseen circumstances or unmet dreams. I think that’s the thing about faith, trusting God to be with us in the unknowable and fulfill our hopes and desires in a deeper way than we could’ve imagined. Is it okay to still ask for what we wanted? Healing? Financial provisions? Mended relationships? Prodigals returning home? A relationship or child? God has exposed me to a world beyond my own black-and-white thinking. He’s shown me that I live in His technicolor world, and it holds space to have grief and regrets in one hand and hope and faith in the other. A beautiful example of this is when God flooded the earth. God was described as having regretted creating creation. People were..people, and that inherently weren’t made to be bad but we made bad choices that had consequences. If I could go back in time, I’m not sure how I would use that power. I can’t promise it would be for good. It might be to get that question I missed on an exam. I might give a snappier comeback to a heckler in my life. I might stop myself from encountering certain people or relationships. If I could go back, would I change things? The thing about God is that He invented time, so going back isn’t a problem for Him like it is for me. But He holds His own regrets. He’s pained by what happened. His own choice has grieved Him, so God understands what it means for me to grieve what my choices have brought for myself too. There is no situation or emotion God doesn’t understand. He’s cool that way. Anyways, before He decides to wipe the earth (literally a clean slate), He sees Noah. He sees Noah, His cute little human being and creation, being a righteous man. He’s a man who loves God in a world of people who hate or ignore Him. God changes His mind from flooding the entire earth, and He decides to let Noah, his family, and a pair of every animal live. The power of changing your mind is not a sign of weakness. It’s not going back on your word in this case. It’s having gratuitous mercy and grace. It’s having the hope that it’ll be different this time, and God made sure of it. God made sure that this time wouldn’t be the same as last time because He was going to be the one who made all things possible. I used to think that changing your mind meant you lost who you were. Changing your mind doesn’t invalidate what happened. God was still rightfully upset and disappointed and angry and frustrated, but that didn’t mean He couldn’t save Noah and his family. Him changing His mind included the validity of His own hurt while leaving space for grace. The space to say that even though I should be upset and I still am, I can still choose to forgive you and love you and have a relationship with you. God chose to change His mind on ending the world because He chose to not change His mind on loving us. That is powerful, really really powerful. Sometimes you have to change your mind to be MORE of who you are. For me, sometimes the first choice I made was out of fear or ignorance. I didn’t know what choice A was going to bring me, and I had to make a choice so that’s all I knew going forward. Instead of forcing choice A to work when it’s clearly not working, going back and if possible, choosing choice B is an act of wisdom. If I go down a street with a roadblock, trying to keep going on that street is a waste of my time. It’s better to turn around and take another route. Sometimes it just means I might even have to take longer or ask for help, but that’s okay. It’s okay to not know where a road will lead. There’s compassion and grace and God’s redirection. Letting go of black-and-white thinking is a skill. It’s a mental muscle to be able to say what I knew before was not the best for me now. It’s not wishy-washy to grow. I think there’s a change of our mind that does come from insecurity. Maybe I’m going back and forth out of fear? I can’t trust the choice or my decision making skills, I have to trust in the person leading my life. Jesus leads me through the storms and to the still waters. Jesus lets His sheep go off, and He looks and finds them again. He brings them home. I enjoy being found, and Jesus enjoys finding me. It is a great thing to change your mind about being lost to being found.
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