Blessings Beyond Our Dreams (excerpts)
Jonathan Parnell – The Unwasted Life
“The biggest impact, as the spiel goes, comes from the biggest dreams, and therefore, if you want your life to really count, you need to broaden the horizons in your mind. Our deficiencies are mainly in our expectations, not our competencies. Think bigger. Invest your best in what yields the maximum payoff. And then, if really true to form, there will come a string of words like “greatness,” “leadership,” and “influence.”
“When it’s sincere and given the right qualifications, big-dream messages like this are wonderfully inspiring. We should seek to listen, to learn, to grow. And at the same time, when advice like this is at its worst, and when we are at our most naive, we’ll digest faux-Christian precepts as if they were Scripture and mistake the favor of God to be in all that’s new and flashy.
“And if we’re not careful, we’ll think that God mainly cares about us gaining followers and doing action, that mainly he just doesn’t want you to waste your energy on low-impact drivel. We’ll think that God’s real blessing is found in our giftedness, in what we’re able to build and where we’re able to go.
But that’s not true.
“Undeniably, God wants us to do great things in his name, except it really matters how we define “great,” and what we’re actually looking for in it. “Great” probably isn’t as glorious as you imagine. In fact, for those men who want to change the world, what you might need most is a wife who wants you home for dinner. Somewhere in the stuff like that is where you’ll find God’s blessing.
“Like in an infant whose diaper needs changing, and a toddler who lives for your attention — a toddler, not an audience. The real blessing isn’t found behind shiny platforms, but in the garbage bag that must be taken out. There is God’s favor, there in the mundane, when we’re stuck between two worlds, seated with Jesus in the heavenly places and bent down here cleaning floors. There is where God smiles on his children.
“The greatest blessings in life aren’t found in being a great leader, or a great communicator. The greatest blessings are found in being human before the face of God — a human forgiven and righteous in Christ. Didn’t he say that to us? “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:20).
“This kind of blessing is much more quiet than the glitz we think we crave, indeed so quiet that we usually miss it, and we’d only long for it if it were gone. It’s the deep blessing that too easily evades us.”
“The greatest blessings are found in being human before the face of God.”