We spend a lot of time educating ourselves, don’t we? It starts when parents rush their children into learning colors, the alphabet, shapes, and phonics, well before the years of schooling designed to teach those things. Repetition becomes boring to those who’ve already mastered those basics. Teachers struggle to get everyone “one the same page,” preparing their young charges for standardized tests that prove little except what a child can do in that forty minutes on that particular day. Allergy attacks, distractions, be damned. Everything hinges on test week in April or May.
Then, we get tracked into a college prep program or vocational path. Then we take the required courses in the right order to earn a paper that says we’re qualified to do this or that. We probably learn, mid career if not before, that we’d much rather do something diametrically opposed because we made a decision in seventh grade when we didn’t know what on earth we wanted to do.
Sociologists know that we do not “know ourselves” until life experiences change our focus to what we’re better suited for. That’s when hobbies become careers, and that college degree doesn’t open all the doors we thought it might. Then, we become more wise.
Here’s what scripture says we are to do. Let us all learn from this stated wisdom: “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12). God has prepared a place for us ahead of time. It may have little to do with how we begin and everything to do with where we end up.
Today, our church commissions one of our own out to pastor a church in Orlando. Brian Lum Shue Chan has blessed our congregation with his presence as a successful engineer. He and his wife Debbie have raised an amazing family of four children, remarkably home schooled and now completing college courses and graduating, one after another. They have blessed our church in diverse ways. Brian has completed seminary training and is now read to pastor a church. We know it is not where he started out. But it is where God is now calling him to be.
That is how listening to God’s direction can take us in paths we may not understand unless we understand God’s sovereignty and His plan for each life. We stand in awe when something miraculous like the ordination and installation of a church pastor occurs. We bless them on their way.
So it is for each of us. We are to bloom where we are planted to be open to God’s calling purpose of each of our lives. We rejoice when we see evidence of His leading.
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