A pastor friend of mine left his church saying there were control issues, which led to an illness. The deacons were sick of him. The fact is that we all have control issues. I have discovered that the winners really don't win and the losers never forget.
Most of our problems come from trying to be in control. We waste a lot of energy on things we can't control. You can devise a great strategy and even pray all night that the sun will not come up, but it will. When the north wind blows, you can say and do anything you want, but it's going to blow whether you like it or not. The best thing to do is to find your big coat and accept that the north wind will blow.
If every morning when you wake your goal is to straighten out people, you probably should be a funeral director. When he straightens out people they stay straight, but the rest of us have to redo it each day.
A nervous passenger once asked the captain of an ocean liner what would happen if the ship hit an iceberg. "Nothing," replied the captain. "The iceberg would move right along as if nothing happened." That's the way life is folks, it's going to move right along.
None of us controls the universe. If we did we couldn't make life any better anyway, because we wouldn't know what was good or what was bad. Even Garth Brooks understood that. He sang a song titled, Thank God for Unanswered Prayers. I can identify with that. Do you remember when you were in high school or college and in hormone heaven? You had to marry that particular person, but it just didn't work out. You were devastated and thought, "How can life go on?" Then many years later you ran into that same person. After you saw them, you thought, "Thank God for unanswered prayers!"
Life is like a parade. We only see what is in front of us, but God sees the whole parade. He has a much better perspective. My favorite football team hired this great coach and pays him millions of dollars to coach. But if you watch him on the sidelines, he has a headset on, and he's taking advice from some guy up in the press box looking down. Why? Because the coach knows that the other guy has a better perspective.
I'm like that. Many times I don't know what's going on down here. I need Someone who looks at life from up there. Let me explain it this way: A little boy had a toy boat that he played with at the pond. One day he lost his boat. It drifted away from him, and he tried everything he could to get it back, but he couldn't reach it. As he was watching the boat drift away, trying to figure out what to do, he saw a man further down on the shore throwing rocks at the boat.
The little boy turned around in anger and said, "What are you trying to do, sink my boat? Crash my boat? What are you doing?" The man just smiled and kept throwing rocks. The little boy yelled, "Quit it!"
He ran up to the man and demanded, "What are you trying to do?" The man replied, "I'm trying to help you." "What do you mean trying to help me? You're going to wreck my boat." The man said, "Look at your boat." As the boy looked at his boat, he realized that the man was throwing the rocks over his boat. The ripples of water were bringing the boat to the shore where the boy could reach it.
What's the bottom line? Resign. Don't resign your church. Resign as General Manager of Planet Earth. With your hand over your heart repeat these words: "I, being of sound mind and body, do fully realize and admit that I do not now, or have ever, or ever will, run the universe. Therefore, I hereby offer my resignation as General Manager of Planet Earth."
Feel better already, don't you. Now that you've resigned, remember the rocks that turn into ripples and that God sees the whole parade. Believe me, that makes the clowns (and the deacons) of this world a whole lot funnier.
