LIFT OFF THE LID
If we’re honest, we don’t like putting ourselves in unknown situations where we’re unsure of our ability to adapt or handle ourselves. There is no closer example than that we are all in the throes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution but many still remain digital migrants living in the margins of a new digital age.
As the saying goes, ‘What we don’t know won’t hurt us’; but hiding in ignorance puts a lid on how we experience life and relationships. How do we know if someone is living under a lid? You will hear common refrain like: I’m not cut out for it. I’ve enough to do every day. I’m happy with what I have, and so on. They put a lid on how much change is allowed in their lives. With regards to a God who seems incomprehensible, they’re happy to keep Him within the confines of rational thinking and resist any persuasions that require a change in them. In their minds, they say, God doesn’t push people to change.
Well, God led King David to several hard lessons in his life. The man who is now remembered as a friend of God, a man after God’s heart and the great Psalmist, let’s not forget that his name was also almost synonymous with Goliath, King Saul, Jonathan and Bathsheba. In fact, we cannot mention King David without conjuring up the other names associated with him. He was not one who avoided adversities even the size of Goliath; he spent a lot of time in the company of a mentally deranged king; he was a deeply empathetic and loyal friend to Jonathan in spite of sharply conflicting interests; and he also had a strong sexual attraction to Bathsheba and caused the death of her husband.
What are the words people use to describe you? Risk averse, restrained, avoidant? Or compassionate, courageous, congenial? Or unpredictable, ‘a wild horse’, a ‘handful’? Maybe we are all these and more!
To be sure, our lives are riveting biographies just waiting to be written. When we step into a new life with God, He gives each believer a promising title and an introduction chapter describing His dreams and all His potential that lies within us. “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139:16b). But beyond that, it remains a biography that is largely fragmented because we are afraid of what it may reveal about us and we keep our lives from unfolding in the way that God wants it to. In other words, we put a lid on our own testimonies.
There are two kinds of lids that prevent us from living fully in God. They are the lid of limitations and the lid of the unknown. How do we lift these lids off our lives?
The Lid Of Limitations
From the beginning, David had a good enough existence within the confines of family and tradition. As the youngest among his more able siblings, he was doing exactly what was expected of him. Who could argue with that? No one gave much thought to his God-given potential until God sent the prophet Samuel to anoint the sweaty and smelly shepherd boy and pulled him out of a culturally-defined existence.
No matter where we are, there are inescapable cultural traditions relating to gender roles and age that not only put a lid over our potential as human beings, but also on our belief about the person God wants us to be, the possibilities He wants us to pursue, as well as what we will allow Him to do in our lives. At the same time, economic realities like widespread job displacement and unemployment can seem to loom larger than God’s power to remove limiting exogenous factors to create unique outcomes for us. Over and above all these, our personal habits and hang-ups such as a fear of failure, a fear of being wrong or a fear of conflict can also hold us back from letting God have a greater influence and involvement in our lives.
Take a pause and consider: Do you have the habit of describing yourself in one way and seeing yourself only in that way? Has God placed someone in your life to show you a purpose beyond a safe and contented existence? Are you proud of your resistance to change and prefer to think of yourself as stable rather than rigid? What is a lid that is restraining you from experiencing new outcomes and realities with God?
The Lid Of The Unknown
We often mistake what is known and unknown as moral values to live by rather than outcomes of our actions. At one point, the lids that exist in our lives were necessary to protect us when we were most vulnerable so that we can find time to recover from whatever we were going through. But while they were meant to be removable shields, they often turn into fortresses that lock us in the past and keep us from experiencing anything new with God. To avoid the unknown - good or bad - we confine our life experiences to predictable routines, responses and results: nothing changes.
Inadvertently, by avoiding the unknown, we limit the unleashing of God’s power for breakthroughs in our lives. We keep the lid on miracles waiting in the wings, on reconciliation that is one step away on our part, on taking the right kind of risk to push back irrational fears once for all, and we keep ourselves from evolving into a new creation in Christ.
Therefore, before we can lift the lid of the unknown on our lives, we must first lift the mental lid we have unwittingly placed on God. Learn to trust Him fully and sincerely. Leap into the unknown because we trust that He is right there with us. Let the Word of the Bible that we read activate our imagination in new ways!
God has written a great introduction for your life and there is so much more that lies in the unknown, waiting to be uncovered. Take a new journey into the unknown with Him. There is so much to discover about God in that journey, and so much within you for Him to develop and deploy for His Kingdom purpose!
