Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.
Genesis 11:4-5 NIV
There we were, just over a year ago, like racehorses at the gate ready to bust through and give 2020 all we had. We were going to do more, make more, and be more than we had ever had! Just watch and see! We had crazy high goals and we WERE going to hit them all. Then in the beginning of March we were totally blindsided with a pandemic. We were confident that it would only be a couple weeks and we would get our life back on track, but week stretched into week and here we are nearly a year later, little having changed.
What about all of our plans? What about all the things we were going to do? Big things, important things, good things that would bring honor and glory to God? For most of us 2020 did not turn out like we wanted it to and we were left asking God why? Why did He allow a pandemic to ruin our plans? Why did He allow all this craziness to happen? Didn’t He want all the good things we were going to do to come to fruition?
In Genesis we hear the story about the Tower of Babel. All the people of the world were speaking one language at this point and they decided they wanted to build a huge tower reaching to the heavens, because what couldn’t they do if they all came together to work on this? God saw what they were doing and that their intent wasn’t good and He confused their speech by giving them different languages so they could no longer understand each other. Just like that their plans were destroyed and people slowly dispersed to different parts of the earth. I wonder if in 2020 we were a little like these people from Genesis, hurriedly working on building our own Tower of Babel.
Perhaps our problem was not what we intended to do but rather how we intended to do these things. Were we leaning on God to show us HIs will and desires for us in 2020? Or were we hoping He was on board and we raced ahead shouting to Him over our shoulders about all the things we were off to do? Maybe He allowed this very bad thing to happen in order to give us a reminder that we couldn’t miss that we can’t do anything alone. Maybe He wants us to remember how fleeting life really is and that when it comes right down to it the only thing that matters at all is our relationship with Him. Not our todo lists. Not our big plans. Not even if we live or die- but rather where we will go when we die. We have work on this earth to do, but if we aren’t doing the right work none of it will matter. It’s not about the Tower of Babel we had in mind to work on this year, it is about the work He would have us do.
This year rather than racing ahead with our plans like we did last year I invite you to pause, and pray over all your dreams and goals and really seek His will for you in this coming year. I pray we spend this year chasing His dreams for our lives and not just our own.
Read the whole chapter in Genesis right here!
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