Planning for success

This week is on Luke 1:18-20:

Zechariah asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years."

The angel answered, "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time.

These verses take place right after Zechariah, who had been praying for a son for years, was told by the angel Gabriel that his wife would soon be pregnant with the son he'd been praying for. Much like Abraham's situation in Genesis, that shouldn't have been possible. Both husband and wife were well beyond childbearing years, so it was doubly impossible for them to have kids. Not only were they infertile, but their time was up, reproductively speaking. God is a God of miracles, though, and that fact is surprisingly difficult for us to grasp.

I've been praying for years to get some money for taking a sabbatical, maybe even enough to be financially independent for awhile. There are a lot of things I'd like to do with my life that don't fit within the American two-week window for office absences. Yesterday, I had a revelation, as if God was asking me, "What if someone handed you, right now, a briefcase containing over four months' salary, on the condition that you quit your job and do those things?" My first thought was "There's no way. What if I don't get my job back after those four months are up? I don't even know how much health insurance is, or what I'd do with my house, and so on." Even though I've been praying for ages for this, I am not anywhere near ready if the call came. That's pretty messed up.

So Zechariah and I have something in common in the two thousand year gap between our lives. We believe God can answer our prayers, but not enough to have a game plan for when he does. It's like asking your best friend to throw you a baseball, and when he does, you turn your head to talk to the person next to you. When you get clocked in the head with a baseball, it's going to be your fault. Zechariah couldn't speak for at least nine months, because he got clocked with God's baseball. Do you want that to happen to you?

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that you're called to be a missionary to Spain. You've done the easy stuff, like learning some Spanish and developing a taste for Goya products, but what if someone walked up to you tomorrow and handed you an envelope with plane tickets and ten thousand dollars, telling you to pack up and go start your ministry. Could you do it? Would you be ready if your call came due tomorrow?

We make plenty of plans for bad things. We buy insurance. We wear helmets and seat belts. We put money aside for emergencies. We lock our doors at night. Most of us don't plan for success, though. What if those things you're praying for got delivered to you? If you're praying for a husband or wife, is your life ready for that? If you're praying for kids, are you ready to be a parent? If you're praying for a scholarship, are you ready for school? What if you actually were completely healed, and you lost your benefits and had to go out searching for a job? What if you did get a promotion? If you ask for a million dollars, do you know what you'd spend it on? I have no idea, and yet I pray for stuff like that all of the time.

God will answer our prayers, and sometimes that's the scariest thing in the world. How stupid must we be, though, to be surprised by something we've been asking our biggest fan, the most powerful being in the universe, to help us get? When you order pizza, do you call the cops when you hear a knock on the door? Sometimes God wants us to have what we want to have.

The most spiritual farmer in the world believes that God will send rain during a drought. He tells all of his friends that God has rain coming, and sings songs about it. He does everything but plant seeds. The unspiritual farmer tells nobody anything, except maybe that he doubts God will get him out of this drought, but he figures he might as well plant seeds just in case. Which one do you think will get the blessing when rain comes? The smart but skeptical farmer who has a plan in case his faith pays off, or the idiot farmer who knows all of the right things to think and say, but not what to do?

I'm kind of shocked to admit that part of me hopes that the man with the briefcase full of cash never arrives. I'm not ready to receive the visitor I call for almost every day. Lets plan to be ready for what we ask for, or for what we're told is coming. I don't want to be caught speechless like Zechariah.