The Big Picture

Have you ever been in a situation where God is taking you out of your comfort zone? To a place or a situation where you don’t want to go? Perhaps trading your high paying job for a low paying job so you can spend time in prayer and with your family? Or a work place where you can be challenged all the time? Or enduring that annoying co-worker or boss? Or breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend? Whatever it may be, God maybe leading you to see the “big picture”.

You see when Jesus ascended into heaven (Luke 24:50), he could have done it in any other place, but instead he led the disciples outside of Jerusalem and led them to Mount Olives. Perhaps he want them to see or experience something that they would not be able to see if they were in Jerusalem. Before Jesus entered Jerusalem prior to his Passion, he saw it from a distance and wept, he said, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” (Luke 19:42). He saw something from far away. And this is where God may be telling us to step outside of our comfort zone and see the situation from a far away place. It could be a church, chapel, outdoors, retreat, meditation, a conversation or a prayer with a friend, whatever it maybe, we need to detach ourselves from that current situation and see from afar. Maybe our current situation is not advancing our spiritual life.

I once learned that when God puts us in that kind of situation, he is lovingly (and unknowingly to us), trying to stretch our capacity to love.  Just when we think that our situation is hopeless and frustrating, and sometimes it is just taking way too long for Him to answer our prayers, instead of turning into grief and complaining, why don’t we praise God for allowing us to share in His cross and pray for the grace to endure and to see the big picture. In the end, we all know that there is victory in the cross. It is when we give God the permission to work in us, even when it’s painful, that grace flows down like rain, and that grace will allow us to see the “Big Picture”.

Jesus loves you.