"May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit."

Larry Hein, taken from Brennan Manning’s Abba’s Child

You have to read that quote two or three times before you realize that it is actually a blessing and not a curse. 

Yesterday I traveled to the Qinghai countryside with a Brit who really loves trees, a partial-Kiwi who makes a pretty mean loaf of bread, and a Minnesotan who nods and smiles in the face of incomprehensible Qinghaihua (i.e. the Qinghai dialect.)  As we bounced from office to office and from "forest" to forest (if you count these poplar twigs pockmarking the countryside as forest) I pondered the fact that our expectations weren’t being thwarted nor our plans being completely frustrated.  Many things worked out in our favor.  In China, you celebrate victories like this.

But the other thing I kept thinking was that it is almost impossible to think too far ahead here.  Our family has plans to some day move out to an area of the countryside.  We would like to, anyway, under the right conditions.  But I find it hard to conceptualize and envision because things seem to change so rapidly here.  What you expect is often not what occurs.  What you don’t expect, you can almost expect…because it’s bound to happen.  It’s a mind-bender, but it’s often true.

I guess I say all this just to point out that though I may feel powerlessness and a sense of "poverty" in these situations of not-knowing, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  Maybe it will make me (us) the children of God that we need to be ("singing and dancing in His presence")–relying on Him and His power instead of our own. 

It’s somewhat counter-intuitive to think this way, but so many kingdom principles are, aren’t they?
Receive the back-handed benediction, folks.