where's the reset button?

grades back on 4 of my 5 classes: 3 A's and a P (pass). sweet! i am 1/4 of the way done with seminary and SO excited!

this morning i went for a run, somewhat unexpectedly. i wanted to work out, but wasn't in the mood for the gym and it was too early to do one of my videos (didn't want to hop around and wake up my neighbor downstairs!), so i just ran/walked around downtown and some of the nearby neighborhoods.

it was a good time to continue the prayer time i'd started earlier, and just ask God to speak to me, wake me up to things that i'm blind about and what not. i was going on and on, praying for people and telling Him different things i was concerned about when i walked past a new house that was being built. right then He started speaking to me about this idea i've had about starting over. i've had the question running through my mind lately, what if we just started over? i think about that a lot in ministry--there are so many things that drive me crazy, and i just want to, well, start over. it seems like it'd be so much easier than cleaning up stuff and working with the messiness.

i thought about it a lot when we were fixing up my house over the past few months. so annoying and time consuming (and really, i hardly did any of the work myself!). i just wanted it to be done, and with all the fixing of old things, i thought, wouldn't it be easier to just start from scratch, just have a new house?

and i've thought that way with ministry, and life in general. where's the reset button? how do we wipe the slate clean and begin again? all these things that aren't working, or that i just don't like--let's scrap them and do something NEW. won't that be better and easier and simpler?

no. not really.

building a new house, with all new stuff, is not problem free. just a different set of problems from the old house that's being fixed up. new church plants aren't problem free, just different problems from older, established churches. new believers aren't without problems either--none of it works that way, but it sure is easy to see the grass as greener on the otherside.

ugh.

but this was a good realization this morning. i don't think i'd realized how much i was hanging everything on change and new and whatnot. there are things that need to change, but the big reality is, I am not the one who knows it all or how it will all work. i HAVE TO trust Him and let Him guide me, or i just end up sounding like a whiny, broken record.