O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done marvelous things, things planned long ago. (Isaiah 25:1, NIV)
If you’ve learned anything in golf after all these years, I hope it is this: You can work on the process, but you cannot control the outcome.
No matter how much good mental imaging you do lying in bed the night before or driving to the course that day, no matter how well you see a shot in your mind’s eye before taking the club back, all you’ve done is go through an important visual routine. You still can’t say what the shot will do when it leaves your clubface.
You can’t tell if it will slide up the face an extra groove because of the moisture in the grass.
You can’t predict the wind speed in the moment after you strike your shot at the peak of the trajectory to which you’ve hit it.
You can’t know whether the precise spot at which your ball will land is the square yard where the worker’s cell phone rang causing him to accidentally put too much water down while syringing the green five minutes before you arrived.
In golf, you can’t lay plans like this, no matter “how bad you want it.”
Which makes God’s wondrous work in our lives all the more amazing. His plans for you and me and the world around us have been in place for ages.
Sometimes—perhaps because we spend so much of our lives reacting to circumstances around us, whether we brought them on ourselves or they came crashing down on top of us—we think the same of God; he’s adjusting to the things that happen in our lives, rushing in when we call on him and saving the day.
He saves the day, all right. But it’s no rush. He saw it all coming.
Step back if you will and consider the marvelous things God has done in your life and in the lives of those you know best. Then consider this: he planned these marvelous things long, long ago. That means, simply, that he knew who you were and what your life would look like even before your mama did. Indeed, Jesus lamented of Jerusalem that while he had looked to gather its children together, “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,” they were unwilling to be gathered. They did recognize God’s plan for them, that salvation would come through this surprising Messiah.
Let’s not be surprised by God’s plan. Let’s recognize it, rejoice in it, and know that what he is working in our lives is a true marvel.
—
Jeff Hopper
August 7, 2013
Copyright 2013 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.