trading in the lantern of logic

Have you ever noticed that much of the time God is not logical? Forgetting that God sees the entire canvas of our lives, it often happens that our finite minds supersede the vision of God’s heart for us. Being the definitively logical person that I am, sometimes He and I go around and around about this.

This morning while I was reading my bible and devotions, I read something that struck a cord with the things God has been doing in my life: “It cannot be stated definitely what the call of God is to, because His call is to be in comradeship with Himself for His own purposes, and the test is to believe that God knows what He is after.”

I am the queen of logic. I am dangerously analytical and I think things to death. I am the girl with the plan. I am the girl that was the heartbreaker in high-school—not so much in the boyfriend-hopping sense—but because most of the time when someone would ask me out, my response would be somewhere along the lines of, “Well, I know you’re not the type of guy I’d like to marry, so probably not.” Sure, I still acted like a squirrelly schoolgirl some of the time, but it was never long before my logic would crash the party of my adolescent emotion. Perhaps my logical intellect was also part of the reason I never got caught up in scenes of drugs and alcohol that were rampant in my small town. It just didn’t make sense to me.

The logic that spared the innocence of my “youth” sometimes feels like it could be the death of me today. Sure, my intellect could take me straight to the top if my goals were fame and recognition… But there is something different my heart is chasing after. Something deeper. This “something” is the heart of God, and it is attached to His purpose for my life. My intellect will never get me to the heart of God—it is a place I can enter only through the shadows of faith and obedience. My logic detests this.

For much of my life, logic has been my light in the darkness, my way of seeing the world in a manner that is a step removed from the hype of those around me. As God continues to speak to me about the next steps in my life, I have been asked to turn in my lantern of logic and reach instead for the right hand of God in the shadows of my uncertainty. The test truly is, as Oswald Chambers so beautifully reminded me this morning, “to believe that God knows what He is after.”