Last Wednesday I did a 45-minute interview with Randy Featherstone on KBJS radio in Jacksonville, TX. Our topic was "Discovering God's Will for Your Life." In the course of our interview, Randy mentioned a song by country music star Martina McBride called God's Will. It's all about a little boy wearing braces who comes to her door on Halloween night. His father was gone, his mother worked all the time, and the little boy struggles to find his way in the world. They begin to spend time together, and slowly her life begins to change:
I've been searchin', wonderin', thinkin'
Lost and lookin' all my life
I've been wounded, jaded, loved and hated
I've wrestled wrong and right
He was a boy without a father
And his mother's miracle
I've been readin', writin', prayin', fightin'
I guess I would be still
Yeah, that was until
I knew God's Will
The little boy's name was Will. When she met him, she found "God's Will" for her life. The song contains an enormous truth. Here is a woman who has been searching for meaning and purpose. Then one Halloween night, as if by chance, a boy in braces shows up at her door, and her life is changed forever.
Most of us spend an enormous amount of time trying to "find" God's will, as if God is playing a game of cosmic hide-and-seek with us. We wrestle and agonize hoping that by our detailed plans, we will suddenly discover the hidden blueprint that has eluded us thus far. Perhaps we're starting with the wrong assumption. Most of the time we don't "find" God's will. Most of the time it "finds" us. I suppose all of us can look back at the major turning points of life and see how a pattern of events just "happened" in a certain way that led us in a certain direction. As a massive ship is guided by a tiny rudder, our lives often turn on small decisions and unexpected events. An unplanned phone call, a chance conversation in the hallway, a friend we “happened” to meet in a restaurant, a fragment of a remembered dream, a book we meant to return but didn’t, the dry cleaning we forgot to pick up, a newspaper story that led to an idea that became a dissertation topic that earned a degree that opened a door to a job in another country. It happens all the time. For all our obsessing about "finding" God's will, when we look back, we see that God's will found us first.
So pay attention the next time someone it knocks on your door. It might be God's Will.
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