Before you do that…

And Elijah said to her, “Do not fear; go and do as you have said, but make me a small cake from it first… (1 Kings 17:13, NKJV)

It’s not that your plans don’t matter or that your feelings are not important, but to achieve what you really want to achieve may require you to do something else first.

I remember walking in a wonderful church when I went off to college.  The church building was majestic, the congregation was large, the music was inspiring and the energy was electric.  Knowing that I had a call into the ministry on my life, I remember saying to myself, I want to pastor a church like this someday.

Wonder of wonders, I eventually did!

But before I could do that I had to go through a lot of other ordeals and life experiences.  Sonja and I served small congregations in less that ideal buildings and communities.  During those years we learned to deal with a vast array of persons, personality types, cultures, and contexts.  In all of those experiences God was using them to train us and teach us and prepare us for the day that we’d be standing as pastors in our own beautiful and majestic church with inspiring music, full of wonderful people and high energy and pinching ourselves to make sure we were not dreaming. 

Amazingly we weren’t!  Our dream came true…but only after we first did a lot of other things.

And one more thing, we didn’t do them in order to eventually get to our dream, we did them because we working at making our dream come true right where we were.  And I think that is one of the most important takeaways; if we had not had the character and passion to give our best where we were why would God have given us more?

I remember working at MacDonald’s during those same college days.  I was the “maintenance man” (wink, wink).  What that meant was that I mopped floors and cleaned bathrooms.  I remember one day the owner, maybe noticing that I was a less than enthusiastic about my “maintenance” job, saying to me, “David, if you act like you own the company, one day you will.”

He was right.

While I’ve never owned a MacDonald’s franchise (And don’t want to!) the lessons learned and character built during that season helped me to gain something far better than owning my own MacDonald’s. 

Let me be like Elijah speaking to the widow to you today. 

Elijah didn’t mock the widow’s plans and desires, he just knew that God had something better for her and told her, “Go ahead and follow through on your plans, but first, I have something else for you to do.”

Bottom line, throw yourself into today.  Don’t shelve your hopes and dreams, and don’t be discouraged if they seem impossible, put your life in God’s hands, give Him your very best where He has put you for this season, and watch Him work his miracles in your life.

The ONE THING for today: The way to where you want to go is almost never the way you thought it would be.  “First do this…” is almost always God’s method.  So I ask you, what do you need to do first?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash