I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. I can’t exactly remember where I first read about this concept, so I don’t really know who to credit for my thinking about this.
I’ve always been an ideas guy. Give me a new idea and a direction to travel – along with the freedom to think outside the box – and I’ll come up with 20 ideas in a relatively short period of time.
Now granted, fifteen of these ideas may be completely ridiculous and beyond realistic implementation, but this is how God has wired me to discover those one or two ideas that are of unique value.
I really do try to stay prayerfully open to God’s plan for my life. But more often than I care to admit, I find myself taking my creative ideas to God with my heart already attached to one or more of them.
Our Heavenly Father invites us to bring our requests to Him (Philippians 4:6). But He would rather we come to Him with an unattached heart.
This is the point of ambivalence. Not in the sense that we don’t care or can’t have passion for something, but in the sense of not having a preconceived idea about how God wants to use us.
To be ambivalent is to be free from the burden of thinking too highly or too lowly of ourselves. It’s to be unchained from pridefully thinking God has to use us in a certain way, or that God can’t possibly use us because (fill in the blank).
It’s the willingness to take the risk of God calling us to do something so outside our current perspective that it may feel foolish to believe that God is even in it.
This sort of approach to God’s plan is foreign to us unless we’re holding ourselves accountable for being fully surrendered to Him.
When our life is about Him and His glory rather than our own, we are freed to be who God has designed us to be.
Lord, where are You calling us today? Can You help us surrender our preconceived plans to You so that You alone may use our lives in a way that would truly transform both us and those to whom You send us?