I live in Southern California about ten miles away from the beach. Splashing in the waves and lying out in the sun (while wearing sunscreen, of course) is as normal to me as breathing. Sometimes I head to the beach for a few hours, other times I head there for an all day trip. But either way, I’ve been to the beach enough times to know that sand is brown and the rocks you find along the shoreline are usually some shade of gray or brown.
So, imagine my shock a few weeks ago when Michael and I went exploring in some local canyons with a trail that led straight down to the beach—a new beach we’d never been to before. When we finished the long trek down to water’s edge we were confronted with a sparking black sand beach peppered with bright red stones.
Everywhere I looked it seemed like tiny diamonds were winking at me as the summer sun hit the black sand in just the right way. When I bent down to pick up one of the smooth red stones I imagined filling a jar with their unusual color and displaying them in my home.
This particular location challenged everything I knew about beaches—even though I’ve been to the beach many times in my life. There was something different and unexpected about this encounter with the beach that refreshed my tired and weary soul. Seeing things that challenged what I expected made the beach a new occurrence for me again and it set me in a mode of exploration and adventure that I hadn’t experienced since I was a kid and the beach was brand new to me.
Sometimes our walks with God can be like my experience with the beach. If we’ve known Him for any length of time we grow comfortable with the familiar ways in which God speaks to us. We expect Him to say the things He always says. While we look forward to our experiences with Him, we’re never looking for Him to do anything new or unexpected.
We put Him in the same box He’s always been in, where the sand is always brown and the rocks are always gray. But sometimes God wants to do a new work in our lives. He wants to take us to a new level of believing Him—not just believing in Him but trusting Him in new adventures in life.
When I was twenty years old God led me on a path the resulted in my first book contract. I wasn’t experienced. The odds were against me. Nobody I knew had ever done anything like that before. But I let the God I knew well in everyday circumstances take me on an adventure through something new and exciting. That one adventure with Him has led to many more adventures in the years that followed.
We all have to get to a place in our faith where we learn to trust God in the unexpected; to follow Him down paths we’ve never experienced before. It involves risk and facing the unknown head on. When we trust God in this way—and we’re willing to abandon our idea of how things should be—we find that God is bigger than we ever dreamed He could be and that our faith is growing as a result.
How have you been putting God in a box and expecting “the sand to always be brown and the rocks to always be gray”? What is one area God may be challenging you to trust Him in new ways?
