Uncomfortable with the Big Picture

As often happens on Mondays, I’m questioning my value and place in the kingdom of God. Sunday was a good day and my class yesterday was also good, at least it seemed to be. However, nothing outstanding happened; no great revelations were given. The class discussions were okay yet I felt a little out of it, as if I didn’t belong there. I’m not sure what I was hoping for, if anything, but today I wonder if I should keep doing this, or is this merely the enemy after me with his spear of discouragement?

God isn’t giving me a pointed answer either. Maybe my shield that should protect me from those fiery darts that undermine my assurance has a flaw in it? The only thing to do is keep reading . . .

My devotional book offers this verse, 1 Peter 1:20, “He (Jesus) indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you who through Him believe in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.”

Again, God gives me the big picture. Jesus is here and has always been; trust Him. Put your hope in God. Yet I’m not a big picture person. I find it difficult to be on the top of the mountain looking down. I’d rather examine each tree and flower at the base, perhaps look up, but from the perspective of the details.

Last night we attended a dinner and listened to a national leader in our denomination. He is a visionary, a big-picture person. I understood what he was saying but felt lost in the sketchiness that a vision entails. I wanted to see it from the grassroots level, from the level of “what do I do tomorrow morning?”

Yet I know the importance in having a vision. The value of even the haziest framework is that it keeps the ‘players’ unified and each person working toward a common goal. In the writers group that I belong to, our purpose statement is often used to test ideas. If they don’t fit our big-picture intentions, then we scrap them. Without a vision, we would be distracted in all directions.

I also have a personal purpose statement. If people ask me to do things, I evaluate them with it. I only say yes if the request fits what God has shown me as my main purpose, or if He clearly wants me to make an exception for that request. I’m thinking I need to consult it again.

Today’s reading offers descriptions of why these days are called “the last days” by Scripture. He says we are living in “the final revelation of God . . . ‘the time accepted,’ ‘the day of salvation’ of which all the prophets have spoken. Christ is now on His throne of grace; the great, the glorious, the only Mediator between God and men is now at the right hand of the Father. The Intercessor who is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever lives to make intercession for them, still lives to plead, as an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, as the great High Priest over the house of God. But He will leave the throne of grace to take His seat on the throne of judgment; and then “these last days” will close in all the glories of salvation to His friends, in all the horrors of destruction to His foes.”

Another big picture.

I’m making lots of decisions, many regarding what to do with the rest of my life. It seems God is giving me so many of these vision statements that I might evaluate and plan the details of my life in light of what He is doing in a global sense, or at least in a larger sense than my little world. With that in mind, I must pray and consider my place in it, no matter how lost or shaky I feel with stepping back for a bird’s eye view.