“There comes a time in the spiritual life when one of the major things God is up to is to lovingly help us see ourselves more clearly.” 1
Many years ago now, I was given a set of questions to think about at the end of each year that would help me set goals for the new year. This was my first introduction to long-term planning and big-picture dreaming. I obtained these questions while sitting in a little room off the side of the sanctuary with a pastor who bubbled over with joy at his opportunity to teach young congregants how to be intentional and order their lives around what God says is good.
He walked us through how to do yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily planning. He explained all the things we needed to think about when it comes to filling in our calendar for each of these time periods. He gave us a list of things that we should think about like holidays, birthdays and anniversaries, church calendars, and school calendars. He encouraged us to plot out our date nights if we were married along with couple getaways and family vacations. He showed us how this all worked together throughout the year as we moved from a 20,000-foot view to a 2-inch view of our daily lives. He painted a picture of how being able to see the landscape of your life from above gave you a better opportunity to walk the path God has for you in the everyday. Truly it was a Saturday morning well spent for me.
However, as I implemented this intentional planning time into my days, months, and years I felt restless like maybe there was something missing.
As I studied Scripture and grew more familiar with the narrative within its pages, I was drawn time and again to the Creation Story. 2 Reading the birth story of Genesis 1 over and over again, I discovered a pattern I hadn’t seen before: God formed before He filled. He separated the waters from the sky. He set the stars in their place, and He formed the dry land. He caused vegetation to grow and everything else needed to sustain life. Then, He filled the earth with birds and animals, and in the end, humans. He formed before He filled.
For the first few years after my class at church, I thought setting aside time to create a template of my life for which I could fill in with all the necessary Christian components: church attendance, marriage priorities, children’s education, and proper amounts of Bible time and prayer was the forming and filling work I had noticed in Scripture. It was, in my mind, my way of ordering my steps according to God’s design. While this has been a good and helpful practice, I’ve since discovered that this can be just a form of control, an illusion really of a well-ordered life, if this process is divorced from the inward forming of my life, which leads me to a question.
Did you know that there are actually two creation accounts in the Bible?
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