Read Psalm 77:11-12 MSG
Once again I’ll go over what God has done,
lay out on the table the ancient wonders;
I’ll ponder all the things you’ve accomplished,
and give a long, loving look at your acts.
I originally went to college to become a Speech Pathologist. I spent four years in classes learning about anatomy, phonetics, audiology, psychology, and education. But mixed in with those classes were clinic placements, labs, practicums, and student teaching assignments. During my student teaching placement my senior year I became increasingly discouraged and irritated with my cooperating teacher. I worked extremely hard to come up with fun ways to incorporate therapy into my sessions and I would spend hours writing lesson plans and reports. But each week, my cooperating teacher would hand them back to me to redo…sometimes twice! Which might not have been so bad had my room-mate not also been in the same major – and her experience was completely different from mine. I wrote lengthy lesson plans with detailed explanations…and she wrote literally two or three sentence lesson plans. It all seemed wildly unfair and frustrating. In a review with my cooperating teacher, I voiced my frustration and she shared with me that she saw real promise in my writing skills. She had me rework my lesson plans and reports not because they weren’t good enough – but because she wanted to help me hone a skill. I would like to say that a light went on and I was grateful for the opportunity…but I was 22 with little life experience and her explanation only helped to mildly assuage my irritation.
It wasn’t until several years later when I began working at Cross Creek that I began to really see the value in all that had happened during my placement. We were a pretty young church at that point with not a whole lot of money. I began researching and putting together activities for weekly small group lessons to go with the Bible story and theme. …I bet you can already see where this is going…well I didn’t! But years later God reminded me that, way back in those college days, even though I was annoyed He had been preparing me for what He had next for me. All that practice writing lessons had come in handy and prepared me to be able to write lesson plans that others could easily understand and follow, too.
Today’s verse is a good reminder to sometimes take a look back at our lives and look for the ways that God has shown up. He may have even shown up and we didn’t recognize him in the moment! But time has a way of revealing things to us. Thank God that it often helps us to see God more clearly too!
Take time today to remember; to look back at how God has and is revealing himself to you. And then thank Him for His presence and for the ways that He has displayed His love and His provision through His plan for your life.
