Leave it with God

Our poor neighbor has been having quite the tussle lately.  Each night he gets home from work, he’s blowing leaves into a pile, getting every last leaf he can off his driveway. The problem is everyone around him has trees and though we do our best to keep our leaves contained invariably he gets what blows onto his property.  He will be very frustrated until all the leaves are finally picked up !

I can’t help but think that sometimes that’s how we are with what God allows to blow into our life.  We want to compartmentalize everything, we want to not have anything messy come into our life which disrupts our plans.  Yet the Lord sometimes allows things to drift in which all told better us if we let them.  These unwanted “leaves” can actually bolster our faith !   I have reminded our church recently that Romans 8:28 has an interesting tense in the Greek (the perfect tense) where it says “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.”   The verb know means that Paul had learned this and it still had effects upon him so that whenever something “blew into his yard” he didn’t get all bent out of shape and whipped out his “leafblower” of anxiety and anger but instead had come to the mentality that God knows what He’s doing perfectly well and so Paul kept chugging along walking with the Lord by faith.   It’s why the apostle could genuinely write about joy to the Philippians while imprisoned in chains !

Do you have some annoying disruption in your life right now?  Are someone else’s “leaves blowing onto your yard” leaving you ticked?  Maybe, just maybe, God has allowed a soft breeze to let their leaves settle onto your “property” to deal with so that you can show Him to them !  Let them see in you the peace OF God which passes all understanding instead of how most would react.  Often God evangelizes best in these ways to hard hearts that have seen a lot of hypocrisy from believers and He’s using the “leaves” of life to rake in souls to His kingdom.  Remember, God controls the elements, He knows exactly what He’s doing, it’s our task to calmly rake those leaves for His glory !!