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One of our desires at BASIC is to be relevant and connect you with content that is going to best help you as you serve your campus and ministry context! In an effort to bring in fresh perspective and new ideas, we have asked a few student leaders and advisors to share their voice! We’ll get to hear from one of them each month. This week, we have the honor of hearing from Taylor Plourde.
In life, we come across seasons of waiting. This can be hard, especially for a leader who is used to blazing the trail ahead. You may fight it at first, I sure did. Instead of submitting to God’s will you may try to start extending your ministry, your career path, your relationships on your own.
Spoiler alert- you can’t do life on your own! You can try, but it is going to be way harder than you could have ever anticipated and it definitely won’t turn out the way you planned. Instead of getting caught up in the here-and-now or trying to keep moving forward, just rest.
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I know, “wait” and “rest” are words that don’t exist in our vocabularies anymore, but trust me, they are some of the most important words in your life. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Psalms. A lot of the Psalms praise God, others lament, but a common thread through many of the Psalms is the idea of resting in and relying on God.
Still not convinced? Imagine that you are baking some cookies. You get all the ingredients out and then follow the recipe to make the dough. You add in some chocolate ships and then it’s ready to bake. You scoop them out onto a tray and put them in the oven but instead of setting it to 350 degrees, you set it to 450 degrees, and instead of letting them cook for 15 minutes you take them out after just five minutes. Ridiculous, right? You can’t bake cookies like that; they’ll come out raw on the inside and burnt on the bottoms. So why do we try to live lives like that?
God has a plan, a recipe of sorts, for us to follow. Sometimes we go off book and try to tweak things here and there, and sometimes it works out. Other times we try to rush the process and finish up early, and rarely does that work in our favor. The most apparent solution and the hardest is just to sit back and wait for God’s plan to unfold. Wait for God to finish preparing you and your situation.
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Like I said earlier, this is especially hard for leaders who are used to pushing the limits and barreling full speed ahead at a task or challenge. It may even feel like you are giving up when you wait. But it is in those moments where you wait for God to provide that you are building up your ministry.
At the Roberts Wesleyan College BASIC, we reached a point this semester where we were trying to do too much. We had too many events planned and not enough time to adequately prepare for all of them. At first, we pushed on and tried to keep all the events, but then God stepped in and took away some of our resources, so we had to step back and re-evaluate our plans. We were trying to reach out farther than we were prepared to do. We were rushing the process instead of trusting that God will bring us to the next step. So instead of planning more events, we took a step back and focused on what we knew we were meant to be doing: running BASIC meetings and connecting with our peers.
I personally have been receiving a message from God this past semester or so that I need to wait. I’m still not sure what I’m waiting for, but I do know that when my waiting is finished, I will be a better person and a better leader because I leaned on God in my waiting and rested in his shadow (Psalms 91).
So in your season of waiting hold on to this truth: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” Romans 8: 28 (NASB)
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