God's story doesn't always look like our desires

​At a work meeting the other day, my friend and colleague Colleen was reflecting on how long she had been at her job. I joked that I'm sure glad she got that job, because her getting that job changed my life.

The more I thought about it, though - I wasn't joking.

Back in 2015, I was leading a grant project that was about to end. I was a few months away from being unemployed. The question had begun: how on earth am I going to provide for my family?

I took the grant job knowing it would ultimately end. I took it believing that God would provide a way if I would take on the important work of that grant with very little security.

But here I was now, on the verge of zero security. What now, God? I know you didn't agree, but didn't we agree?!?!

Then my friend Colleen sent me an email telling me about an open position in the department she worked in. A position I eventually got.

There are times we say 'thank you God' without a clue as to what we are truly thanking him for. I believed God was using that job to keep me gainfully employed. Maybe I have never more underestimated the depth and the plot of the story God was trying to write in my life.

That job has unfurled me in ways I could have never seen coming. It's exposed me to winds and waves in this life that have carried me places I could have never seen myself going. Places I never WOULD have gone. Places I so desperately NEEDED to go.

Both in the world and within myself.

I thought I was getting a job that was going to hold me together, when in many ways I got a job that has broken me wide open.

Almost every area of my life has taken on a new direction the last seven years. As I write that, I feel myself correcting myself; I find myself wanting to say the job has given me direction. And where there is direction there is often passion.

You don't fully understand how incredibly painful the lack of direction and passion in life are until you wake up one day suddenly possessing both. Maybe there is no greater source of despair than traveling through life without them?

Our God is a God of direction. His ultimate desire is that all of us are traveling toward him. God understands much better than us that we can all look very very different - behave very very different - yet be traveling in the same direction.

Which is why sometimes it feels like God is answering a prayer when in reality he is putting the prayers on our heart we were never going to pray. And he uses our friends and colleagues and email to deliver them. To in ways unite our direction

We sometimes miss God's presence when we think he looks like a job, when in reality he looks like new direction - or, a first taste of direction at all.

I want to encourage you, some days it feels like we are sending a friend an email. Be open to the possibility God is weaving you into a story much more significant than that. We have no small experiences in this life.

And I also want to encourage you. Your story today, there's a really good chance it is not God's story. There's a really good chance God isn't as interested in answering your prayers as he is in planting prayers within you.

Not because he doesn't love you, but simply because he is better at direction than you are. And than I am.

I know that today - in ways more powerful than I could have ever imagined. I know it because of a friend and because of an email.

I know it because today I can see God in a story where I once could only see a job. Oh what sweet and passionate direction comes with that.

And promise.