I'm Giving Up God's Promises.

"That's it. I'm done. I'm throwing in the towel. God gave me promises, and I don't see them happening. God has asked me to do things, and they don't make sense."

Those are probably things that came to your mind when you read that title, but rest assured, that is not the vein in which I'm moving.

I'm giving up God's promises, because He has so much more for me. I am a entering state of surrender, or at least I'm trying to. You see, I've come to realize that while God does keep His promises, sometimes, oftentimes, they don't look the way we want or expect them to look. Sometimes we get so focused on the promise we forget Who gave it to us, then it becomes an idol.

Would I be willing to go in a new direction even if it means letting go of a promise?
What if God is leading me on a path and we take a sudden detour that seems to lead directly away from the promises of God. Will I still trust Him?
What if I told everybody God is leading "here" and then, by God's direction, I end up somewhere else. Am I willing to stand the questions and look foolish before them?
What if God started to fulfill a promise and then asked me to give it up? Oh, flashbacks to Abraham and Isaac...can I do that? 

So what does it mean to give up God's promises?
To me it looks like opening my hands so that God may give and take away as is His plan. He may empty my hands; He may fill them.
It looks like climbing each mountain before me with my hands wide open. Giving up God's promises looks like throwing a stone in the depths and seeing the effects.

I am giving up God's promises that I may have God Himself.

I will fix my eyes not upon the promise, but upon the Promise-Giver.

Where Did My Expectations Go?

Once accepted on the World Race, one of the first subjects we are asked to write about on our blogs is our expectations. What do we expect to encounter? Do? Gain? Experience? Whatever our expectations, we are encouraged to share them, though, not required.

This is a snapshot of what I expected from my time on the World Race. Now, I will admit that I was an avid WR stalker. I had read many a blog from Racers on the field, getting ready for the journey, and back home. I had a pretty good grasp on what to expect, and that was to expect nothing and everything. When it came down to it, though, I knew I had expectations for the Race and myself.

I look back on this post now almost two years later, post Race, and I can see how God truly did bring each of this expectations to life, sometimes by seemingly tearing them apart. I expected a lot from God, because I knew He was bigger than any expectation I could have, and He met those and even went beyond them.

So now, in this moment I pose a few questions to...myself.

Where have my expectations gone?

Where is that spirit of expectancy?

Here I am seven months off the World Race with no sense of expectancy of the God I saw work mightily for the past year and a half. Oh, yes, I know He is working, and He is going to do amazing things. That's not the expectation I am missing.

Every expectation I had for the World Race was so big, yet He them in a way I couldn't imagine and so much better than I dreamed. I am amazed as I remember, yet also dumbstruck. Not a single one of those expectations is limited to the World Race. Those can still be realized right now, in the everyday American life.

Why haven't they happened yet?

The answer is, because I no longer expected and searched for God to move in the every day.
My God is still the same. He is still able to do whatever needs to be done (and sometimes what wants to be done) for His children and His church. I think it's time I stopped filing things away to pull out and remember later, and put my expectations back on the table.

Starting now I am laying out my expectations once again. I expect God to continue what He has already begun, because that is who my Jesus is. He is a fulfiller of promises, and He finishes what He starts!