Keepin' It Real

In our house, 3/4 of us are yogurt loving people. Of that, 2/3 of us are the kind that like to have to mix it up because the good stuff is on the bottom, while the other 1/3 likes to just add stuff in to the plain kind. As you might have guessed, I'm the 1/3, which makes me a control freak. I control what goes in and how much of it. 

As I sit here looking at my daughter's empty yogurt container, it says cream top, chocolate on the bottom. In order to get to the good stuff, you have to go through the plain stuff or shake the life out of it while the lid is still on. Either way, you end up with something new that is better than what you started with.

In Job 2:10, Job asks his wife, "Shall we accept good from God and not trouble?" I would turn that question to ask, "Are we willing to eat the plain first to get to the chocolate on the bottom, or do we need to mix it up ourselves or add something to it of our own choosing to make it better?" Not a pleasant thought at all to admit what little control freaks we really are.

Okay, so the directions say to mix it up before, or to flip part of the container into the other before eating, but I wonder how much we apply those directions to our lives when sometimes God might just want us to be still. I mean, I have already posted on one person's facebook page asking a question about her dark night, read 3 articles, and found 2 other books I could read trying to rush this process along. And it's been 1.5 days.

We don't know how long Job's suffering lasted, but we do know that when he was restored, he had 10 kids again. So if by chance the last child marked the end of the restoration period, we are looking at a minimum of 90 months based on his wife being continually pregnant. 90 months is 7.5 years. No wonder we talk about the patience of Job! 

Now the last thing I want to do is get in God's way of this process. That's the last thing any of us should want. And while some yogurt might be created to be shaken, stirred, or flipped by the consumer, our lives are not our own and we aren't supposed to be in control. So maybe instead of trying to manage every last detail of our lives down to when it would be convenient to have a mini-crisis on our hands, we just take a step back and bow our heads uttering thy will be done and meaning it. We might not ever understand the full purpose of what we are submitting to, but we can know the one to whom we are submitting. And He is good, all the time.