Respect the Journey

As a birth worker the  idea of "respecting the journey" is something that comes up often. Respect of the birthing woman...respect that her body, if left alone, will birth a baby. Respecting that the baby knows how to be born. God has shown me how this plays out in our journey as Christians as well.
He has also shown me that the journey doesn't really matter.


It's hard for me to wrap my head around this.


But if we could always understand God then He wouldn't be much of a God, right?

When I was pregnant with my first child, I would tell God, "I can't have a baby. I'm not where I need to be spiritually!"

I wanted to be at a place on my journey with Jesus where I spent quality time with him everyday- where my faith could literally move mountains. I wanted to see miracles, healing, signs and wonders everyday and hear God clearer than I could hear my husband.

But I wasn't there at all.

Like, not even a little bit.

God told me something like this:
"It doesn't matter that they (my children) aren't seeing the "glory" of your relationship with me. What         matters is that they see your hunger and your thirst. It matters that they see you pressing on towards your goal and striving to know me better. If they just see the end result, it will all feel way out of their reach. They need to see your journey, and you need to respect your journey and not wish it away."

-----

Just the other day, my daughter was eating her lunch. She was taking each and every pea, squishing it and putting it to the side. She said she was making "pea oil." It took everything in me to just walk away and trust she would eat. I tried so hard to fight every urge to control the way she was choosing to eat her food, after all, I kept telling myself, all I really cared about was whether or not the peas made it into her belly.
I walked away and washed the dishes. To my (very pleasant!) surprise, once I was done, I looked over and she had eaten all of her peas. I heard God say "It doesn't matter how they come to me, all that matter is that they do." This gave me hope that no matter what the journey looks like, the end result is what matters.


Hey, maybe the lesson is this:

They need to see my journey, I need to respect their journey, and God will take care of the end result.