This starts out kinda like a one-shot deal...we respond once rather than react and believe we've got it. Then we learn honest response requires that we take some time, time to consciously seek God's will if we are to selflessly respond, i.e., with grace. The gold is our acceptance that the time we take need be but a single thought for that thought calls God's wonders up from within.
To react, however? That requires no rational thought, but almost invariably brings regret later. Regret begets...ah, here we can fill in the many ways humility arrives un-consciously-bidden.
It's worth noting how spiritual growth...the necessity that brought us to spiritual growth...makes the words we read so comforting, yet the doing of those words so "forgettable." As in, He goes before me to make the crooked places straight. What a comfort when first we read those words; yet, remembering them when we are a quarter way down that crooked place?
Hard, ain't it hard, to quote Woody Guthrie who was singing of something else entirely, but it's all one when self-will is driving the bus.
I take comfort in the message in "God Calling" of June 4: Shortcomings...for which you had had no sense of sorrow, now cause you trouble and dismay. Courage. That is in itself a sign of progress.
Again, we know the gift of thank You. Even (or especially) when the gift appears to be not a boon but a bane. We open-eyed see God's will is not of the reasoning mind. Nor is thank you. And resist not evil? Whose reasoning mind would select that as their first go-to thought?
There. That is why the first requirement in learning to respond, not to react, requires we take time to consciously seek God's will here and now. It's not what we think we need, count on it.
No one can pre-know the wonders of the Lord.
Thank you.
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