The will of God

 How important is spirituality in your life?

I’m not going to talk about my current beliefs and spiritual practices. This blog is about me working with kids, being their advocate, and how and why I made the decision to do so about 24 years ago. At that time, I was an evangelical born again Christian. I attended a college age ministry with my fiancé Caleb Wells, and the teachings were extremely heavy on God’s will not being your will. They harped on it so much that I remember my female roommate at the time struggling because she had been offered two new jobs- one at the ice cream shop across the street and another at a grocery store four miles away. She struggled with “which one was God’s will”. I told her, “Why don’t you take the ice cream store job? That way you can walk to work.” She struggled because that seemed like too easy of a solution. In her mind, God didn’t want what she wanted. She took the teachings about God’s will in our church so seriously that she made it hard on herself. Caleb and I took it so seriously that we broke up, even though we wanted to get married. 

Here are some of the concepts the pastor preached on regarding God’s will: 

Caleb shared my vision for a large, loving, and very positive family experience. At the same time as our engagement, the pastor of the college age ministries was preaching a sermon series on the will of God not being your will. We in that group were all at the age where we were figuring out what to do with our lives. We were picking majors and working while attending college. About half of us were paired into relationships. One thing was for certain though, as I listened to the sermon series on the will of God- I knew that marrying Caleb and having children was “my will”. It’s what I wanted more than anything else aside from my faith in God. I ended my relationship with Caleb after I heard the following concepts in church:
Proverbs 14:12 “There is a way that seems right unto a man, but in the end it leads to death.” (Marrying Caleb and having kids seemed right to me, did that mean it would lead to death?)
Proverbs 19:21 “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it’s the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” (My plan being to marry Caleb and have a family was something that God would have to prevail over?)
Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding.” (My own understanding was that I wanted to marry Caleb and have kids, was trusting the Lord the opposite of this? As in, I couldn’t do both?)
I remember our pastor Jacob saying “Doing what makes you happy is so bad for Christians. We aren’t called to do what makes us happy, we are called to glorify God.” I could think of a lot of things that made me happy besides Caleb. My sewing classes made me happy, and so did my female friends at church.

Then Jacob preached a sermon on 1 Corinthians 7, where the Apostle Paul is instructing Christians not to marry. Marriage and family was seen as a temporal and earthly treasure whereas the family of God is eternal. He didn’t forget to mention that the Bible says that in Heaven, the angels do not marry, because of this. Pastor Jacob then challenged us to examine ourselves and see if we were “making marriage and finding a spouse into an idol”
In another sermon: “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Bible) doesn’t mean that God will give us what we want. It means that if we truly love Him, He will be enough for us and we won’t need an earthly partner. That was what it looked like to truly love God- to truly love His plan instead of our own ways.

While I won’t talk about my spirituality nowadays, I will say that whenever I see any semblance of this in any religious group, I view that group as wanting to control its members. I doubt anymore that they really believe that about God. 

I never stopped loving Caleb Wells, even though I found love three more times after we went our separate ways. 

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