Your Shack, My Shack, and a Bungalow

As for those rumors about me praying "theologically correctly" here's the deal and what my quandary was all about:

I heard a great sermon last night right before I wrote to you.  It was not great because of something the pastor did or said, but rather because of what God said to me and showed me.  The pastor used three or four different texts, but one of them was from Daniel during the story of "your shack, my shack and a bungalow".  We as "modern" Christians are so quick to focus on the first part of the three Hebrew children's answer to the King.  You know, the part where they in a valiant, ready-to-die-for-the-cause way say that "the God we serve is able to save us".  We even like to focus on the second half of their kingly slap in the face: "But even if he does not".  But the part that we modern Christians most conveniently forget is the most powerful and fiery part wedged right in between those to anemic quotes.  "and he will rescue us from your hand, O king."

God showed me last night that I am quick to believe in a god that can do anything, but who rarely does anything.  It's easy for me to say (believing with all my heart) that "with God, all things are possible."  But in practice, I follow it with a quick "but nothing is probable" under my breath.  But that's just not how things are supposed to work.  I can't have on one hand a belief in a God that can do anything and yet believe that He refuses to do most things.  If I'm going to call His power limitless, I have to follow it up with a faith that acts on that belief.  The three Hebrew children didn't wait for God to tell them that He was going to save them before they made such an audacious claim.  And all the people who come to Jesus in the gospel accounts don't simply believe that He was able... they also had to believe that he would.  It was a double faith.  It was a HIGH-risk faith; they had a lot to lose emotionally.  What would happen if they were believing in the wrong thing?  ( i.e. believing in the miracle instead of the Miracle Giver)

And for the past year, I've been thinking the same things.  I've been afraid that having faith of that kind was too dangerous emotionally.  I mean after all, I had burned myself once already thinking that God was promising something to me that wasn't really mine.  I substituted my voice for His and the change was so subtle I never even knew it.  That's why I was so badly hurt.  And that's precisely the HIGH risk that is involved here.  We moderns want some deep assurance that it's actually God's voice that we're hearing, but it's hard to "step out in faith" if it's something that you know so surely.  On one hand we criticize Gideon for not believing the first time, but on the other... we don't step out on our own ever.

~Entonces~
So that's what I'm doing... sort of.  I'm stepping out in a very HIGH-risk faith that God has "someone" for me and that He is going to send her soon; just as soon as He is done preparing her for me, and me for her.  It's HIGH-risk because there is a chance that He wants me to remain single.  But it's not something that I am able to consider at this moment.  Right now I am calling to Jesus blindly as He passes by and believing that if I can just reach Him, He will intervene in this situation and that my prayers will matter and that they will influence His hand of blessing.  There is no room for me to believe that it's possible that this is how He wants me to remain.  That type of doubt is even more dangerous at this moment.  I'm risking enough as it is.