when God asks you to do something crazy

Save this for later!

Have you ever met someone who has had an incredibly hard life?

Maybe you know someone who was in the foster care system, shuffled around from home to home so that she could never firmly attach to anyone.

Maybe you know someone who was abused by a parent as part of a generational cycle of sin and despair.

Maybe you know someone so strong-willed that every person she ever met got into a fight with her.

Maybe you know someone with paranoid schizophrenia, or bipolar, or a personality disorder, or ADD, or ADHD, or FASD, or autism.

For some people, life is just plain hard. They have been given, through no fault of their own, poor raw material for their lives.

Other people get fabulous raw material: strong family, intelligence, pleasant personality, and healthy body and mind. For some people, it’s easy to be good. They have been given, through no strength of their own, excellent raw material for their lives.

What kind of raw material did you get? I have to admit, I am on the receiving end of some excellent raw material. But to those who has received much, more will be expected.

In CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity, he wrote these words, which blew me away when I heard them for the first time:

When a man who has been perverted from this youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those who we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.”

Let’s say, for example, that you and I are in a contest to build a boat. If you are given a bunch of twigs and twine and I am given the raw materials needed for a fabulous racing boat, it’s not exactly fair, is it? Yet this is what life is like. There are a whole host of things that get put into our own raw material, and no one starts out the exact same.

Race, gender, upbringing, presence or absence of parents, personality, community, mental tendencies, location – all of these aspects work together and if you tweak just one aspect, you end up with different raw material.

We humans like to look at people with different raw material and say “I would NEVER make that choice!” But we cannot possibly say that unless we have been built with the exact same raw material and presented with the exact same choices. And that, of course, is impossible.

To go back to the boat analogy, if I had been given all the raw materials for a fabulous racing boat and you had been given the raw materials for a crude raft, no one would expect you to build a racing boat. But in addition, no one would expect me to build a crude raft, would they? They would expect more from me.

But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

Luke 12:48

When you read this, do you thank God for your good raw material? Then, my friend, you need to read on. You and I, we have been entrusted with much. And that means that much more will be asked.

We were not given good raw material so that we could coast by in life.

Remember the story of Esther? She was given beauty and favour in the harem so that she ended up becoming queen. And when Mordecai asked her to speak on behalf of the Jews who were about to be annihilated, he told her,

And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?

Esther 4:14

She was given a kingdom, and much was then expected of her. She was willing to give her life.

I had just finished reading her story a few months ago, and it was rolling around in my mind at the same time that I wrote this article about self-sufficiency. One day all these thoughts and some other experiences came to a head, and I realized, in a panic, that God was asking me to do something rather strange. He was asking me to donate a kidney.

I fought it, I tried to use my husband as a way out, I tried ignoring it, but I kept coming back to Mordecai’s question to Esther. “Who knows but that you have come to your position (in this case, your health) for such a time as this?”

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@wise4salvation”]”Who knows but that you have come to your position for such a time as this?”[/tweetthis]

So I’m just barely into the process, and I have no idea what the outcome will be, whether it will actually end in organ donation or not. But much has been given to me, and I am trusting God for the chance to not squander it. Perhaps this is my personal version of selling all I have and giving it to the poor.

I am only sharing this to get you thinking about what God might be asking of you. Please don’t give me kudos, because it’s not me, my friends, it’s Him. This isn’t going to be a big public thing, although I might share bits and pieces of the journey as I process them. My part in this is simply taking steps that require immense amounts of God’s presence and power. If you’d pray for me on this journey, I’d love that.

What will it be for you? With what has God blessed you? He didn’t bless you with it simply for you to keep it to yourself. He wants to use you as a blessing to others.

How is he calling you today?

[x_line]

Did you find this challenging? Please feel free to share it with a friend. Together, maybe our little lights in the darkness can make a big difference.

If you’d like to read about the day I actual DID donate the kidney, read here!

Save this for later!