My Pastor, Jeff Adams, is going through a study of Haggai right now.  It’s been absolutely amazing! (you can listen here if your so inclined) So I’ve been reading Haggai in my private time and thinking about what God is doing in my life and the life of our church during this time.

Hag 2.3 - 9 Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? and how do ye see it now? is it not in your eyes in comparison of it as nothing? Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the LORD; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Josedech, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the LORD, and work: for I am with you, saith the LORD of hosts: According to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not. For thus saith the LORD of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the LORD of hosts. The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the LORD of hosts.

It’s been really busy lately, hence my lack of posting to this site, or any site for that matter.  In addition to the normal IT stuff we all have to deal with, we are implementing the Arena checkin system, updating and refining our Shepherd School of ministry website, developing a disaster recovery plan, Integrating the small group features of Arena to mykcbt.org, starting construction for our new foyer and children’s wing, and trying to find a way to properly deal with our discipleship system via Arena.  I’m buried. So this thought started running through my head yesterday while I was in a staff meeting.  We are currently preparing for changing our service times and schedule for Sunday mornings, a change that should dramatically improve what we are doing Sunday morning, and gives us much more purpose and direction in reaching out to our younger church members, a group that often seems to get ignored in the daily grind.  But as I’m sitting there listening to the issues, and the planning and trying to minimize the impeding issues that always arise with a huge change like this it occurred to me, where is God in all of this?  I don’t mean to imply that God’s not in it, not at all. But when your knee deep in the planning and execution of a project you get covered in the details that as a member of the church you just seem to think get magically solved by the mere fact that “God did it.”  Before you think I’ve lost my cookies and am trying to steal the credit for what we have done that’s not the case.  It’s more of a maturing in my realization that everything God does requires or at least desires the presence of human hands.  God has given us a direction to change how we are doing things, but we have to make it work.  Although it’s easy to start to think of the personalities involved and the right or wrong decisions we are making, the truth is God put all these men here to make those decisions.

It’s easy to arm chair quarterback the situation and think, that guy is making a mistake, or this would go a lot smoother if “he” wasn’t involved.  But that’s not how God intended it.  Truth is Jesus didn’t have 12 guys who agreed on everything he did, nor did they always understand the purpose of what they were doing.  Although the Bible doesn’t record it, I’m sure there were moments that Doubting Thomas went to Peter and said, “Dude, this is not the best way to do this, aren’t we making a big mistake here?”  Yet God prevailed despite what appeared to be bad planning or a rough plan.  Being on staff gives us a unique point of view on the changes and planning of our churches.  We see the human struggle behind the divine purpose.  That’s a good sentence there, we see the human struggle behind the divine purpose.  That doesn’t mean we are taking away the Glory or God, no in fact it means we are seeing the Glory of the Ordinary in our own lives.

But it does make this IT person step back and rethink what he is doing and how he is doing it.  My frustration or even voicing of the complexity of the work that is before me, minimizes the hand that God has in all of it.  The truth is, all I have to do is go to work, and do what God has given me talent and ability in to the best of my ability.  I feel a little like Dorthy in this picture, excited that I’ve made it this far, confident that this is where I should be, but pretty freaked out!! Truth be told, I’m not the most qualified man for this job, no not by far, but I have confidence that I am the man God wants in this job, no one else can do my job right now, cause God put me here. God will work out the rest.  Perhaps we need to sit back more and remember what Oz looked like before you saw the man behind the curtain?  Cause the truth is, our Wizard of Oz is still just as powerful and awesome even when men’s hands get involved to make it work.  We can be lead by God to build a new children’s wing, but it takes the hands of construction workers to build it, we can implement a child checkin station, but it takes the hands of our IT department to work out the reports and the hardware to make it work right. The real Glory here is that despite the fact that we are human and full of self pride and other annoying human issue, God’s purposes and plans still happen!

Perhaps we need to remember that the next time we walk out of a meeting thinking that this project is a complete mess! It’s not a mess, it’s exactly where God wants it so that he can be Glorified and we can demonstrate how God works despite our human issues.