God's Will in Six Words
Published: Fri, 10/25/19
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IF YOU HAD TO SUMMARIZE your life in six words, what would they be? Several years ago an online magazine asked that question. It was inspired by a possibly legendary challenge posed to Ernest Hemingway to write a six-word story that resulted in the classic “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The magazine was flooded with so many responses that the site almost crashed, and the responses were eventually turned into a book. Not Quite What I Was Planning is filled with six-word memoirs by writers “famous and obscure.” The memoirs range from funny to ironic to inspiring to heartbreaking:
The challenge of the six-word limitation is its demand to focus on what matters most, to capture briefly something of significance. Winston Churchill once sent a dessert pudding back to the kitchen because “it lacked a theme.” I don’t want my life to be like Winston’s pudding. It is striking to think about what the characters of Scripture might write for their six-word memoirs. I think they would revolve around the intersection of the story of that person’s life with God’s story. They would all be inspired by a divine opportunity that God had set before them and the response —the yes or no —that shaped their lives.
“Not quite what I was planning” is the six-word memoir any of them could have written. In none of these cases would these characters have been able to predict where their lives would take them. They were interrupted. They were offered an opportunity or threatened by danger or both. This is how life works. We are neither the authors nor the pawns of our life stories but rather partners somehow with fate or destiny or circumstance or providence. And the writers of Scripture insist that, at least sometimes, in at least some lives —in any lives where the person is willing —that unseen Partner can be God. Often in the Bible these opportunities seem to come in unmistakable packages. A burning bush. A wrestling angel. Handwriting on the wall. A fleece. A voice. A dream. A talking donkey like in Shrek. But there is another picture of God-inspired opportunity sprinkled across Scripture that is easier for me to relate to. It is a picture of divine possibility that still comes to every life. It is a picture I have loved since my college professor Jerry Hawthorne introduced it to me:
A door, Dr. Hawthorne said, is one of the richest images in literature. It can mean safety (“my door is chained and locked”) or hiddenness (“no one knows what goes on behind closed doors”). It can mean rejection (“she shut the door in my face”) or rest (young mothers’ favorite room is the bathroom, where they can close the door and be alone). But in this passage a door means none of those things. Rather, it is an open door, symbolic of “boundless opportunities. Of unlimited chances to do something worthwhile; of grand openings into new and unknown adventures of significant living; of heretofore unimagined chances to do good, to make our lives count for eternity.”[2] An open door is the great adventure of life because it means the possibility of being useful to God. The offer of it, and our response to it, is the subject of this book. God Can Open a Door for Anybody John Ortberg, All the Places to Go . . . How Will You Know? God Has Placed before You an Open Door. What Will You Do? (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2015). We have just released a new Bible study on topic of God's Will. These lessons are available on Amazon, as well as a part of my Good Questions Have Groups Talking Subscription Service. Like Netflix for Bible Lessons, one low subscription gives you access to all our lessons--thousands of them. For a medium-sized church, lessons are as little as $10 per teacher per year. Sessions include:Lesson #1: God’s Will and My Will Lesson #2: God’s Will and God’s Refreshing Word Lesson #3: God’s Will and the Holy Spirit Lesson #4: God’s Will and the Church Lesson #5: God’s Will and Circumstances Lesson #6: God’s Will and the Glory of God |