My company recently dealt with a “critical customer issue”, which took nearly the entire work day to deal with and resolve. In a nutshell, something that was built to near man-made perfection, and just couldn’t fail, failed. “What is technology but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?” OK, Sir William Oslo actually used “student” in the place of technology in the previous quote, but doesn’t the latter fit? I considered the words of our company president who reminds us on a consistent basis to have a “Kingdom mindset” and to let God be in control and “do His thing”, so to speak, and put that up against the situation that left just about everyone scrambling like a pack of mice in a maze looking for the cheese. Yes, mice run in packs. So I asked myself, again, (oh believe me it’s not the first time), if God was near the situation, if He actually cared about the little things, wouldn’t it have been that nothing like this would happen in the first place?
The divine brick of supernatural reality (whew, roll that around) bounced off my noggin almost as quickly as I lobbed my rock of disbelief up to Heaven…what a short sighted, only-believe-in-what-is- readily-seen, point of view. I was reminded of Elisha in 2nd Kings when the king of Syria sent an army of his men to grab Elisha and bring him in, and they surrounded the city during the night. The next morning, apparently one of Elisha’s servants couldn’t sleep in and woke up early, staggered out groggily to bask in the morning sun, rubbed his eyes, and saw an army surrounding him. “Uh, Elisha, you might want to take a look at this.” Elisha takes a look, and his response, with creative liberty of course, is “Man, don’t worry. Those with us are more than those with them.” Elisha prays for the servant, “Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see.” The Lord obliged, and the servant saw the divine, supernatural reality. The mountain, which I’m assuming is above the city, was “full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”
How often, I’m afraid, am I that servant, and panic when I really don’t know what I can’t see. And what I don’t see is all of the magnificent events and circumstances that He has for me. God’s perfection will always supersede my perceived “reality”. What happened with our critical issue? Many of us prayed together for resolution, and it was eventually resolved and now is even more solid than it was before. But more significant to me is that I have at least one instant of a profession of a colleague to another that as soon as we prayed, something happened, and a part of what we thought was going to be a major problem and struggle, turned out to be easier than we thought, “all of a sudden”. It’s a no-brainer that only solidified God’s goodness within that person, and ministered to the person he was talking to.
God always IS for us, so in work and life, if we follow Him, we can take comfort that He’s in it all, and He has a definite purpose within every good and bad circumstance you and I go through. What a comforting thought when we seem to be experiencing a discomforting world.