by God's Little Boy
© MakeshiftDarkroom.com 2024
Posted 3/10/24

In recent years, my absence has been much more effectual and useful to God than my presence (which would explain the circumstances that surround my absence). It is through my absence that God has been revealing and changing motives and hearts - good is coming out of it. I am accomplishing more in a place of weakness and disadvantage than I could have hoped for in the place of acceptance and honor. I have been given the gift of a "significant insignificance." I can say these things and be used in such a manner since I don't have much more to loose. Some leaders do not have followers. Whether it is recognized or not, I have been, in some small measure, "leading from the back," and used as a driver and mover of God's purpose for sanctification to many within my sphere of influence. I too have been and continue to be changed for the better by this experience.

If you are in contact with someone through whom God chooses to work you are under that influence regardless of any desire or lack of desire to participate - God will have his effect and it can't be denied. God is always working to bring about change in the lives of his people. The important thing is that we all arrive at our destination of being changed for the better, because our end should be better than our beginning. It isn't always the path that we take that is important, but the destination to which the path takes us. For this reason our sovereign God is free to, in rare instances, ordain an unconventional - out of the ordinary path for some to walk in for a higher purpose. Such a path is ordinarily out of place, unless God has appointed it.

I am learning to trust God for the strange and winding way that he has ordained for me, no matter how completely unorthodox and unusual it might seem. I have discovered that I am on a wonderful adventure that God has ordained particularly for me. I am learning to love being used as his misfit in a providentially prepared plan - an outside the box plan that I would never have imagined or chosen for myself. God is in control, and ordains even the most unconventional circumstances of life. Certain conditions in life can be used to move us into unenviable situations for a higher purpose that is beyond understanding. To some, these situations might seem like the problem, but may actually prove to be a solution to other more significant problems that exist elsewhere.

David's time in exile is a good example of these truths. In spite of the great cause that characterized David's life, he once found himself, for a season, exiled in the Philistine held region of Ziklag (of all places) posing as a mercenary for the enemies of Israel (Saul could not bring his troops there to kill David). What a strange and unsightly optic that must have been. How could David, a champion of Israel and Israel's God, be present in such a contradictory situation - in league with a Philistine King and enemy of Israel? At some point during his exile he must have asked himself, “what in the world am I doing here?” What was this anointed would be King doing in a Philistine shanty town scratching and surviving with a band of misfits? It might have seemed to many in Israel that David had turned aside, and that he was not the man he seemed to be after all. But even in the "far country" of Ziklag, David was still David, and God was still with him.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

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