I’m just rattling my own cage here, thinking out loud.
The odd thing about living by your convictions is that you can draw conclusions regrading what it signals in broader terms. If you sense the Lord telling you to go this way or that, you know the other paths offer something He doesn’t want for you. And if it turns out others in your community have the same conviction, it may well be the other paths will be bad for just about everyone else in the world.
I know I’m not alone in thinking the Net is no longer the place for outreach. To be more precise, the people God intends us to reach won’t be reached via an online witness. Right after I began getting a strong sense about that, other believers outside our community were writing the same thing about it. This reemphasis on face-to-face faith witness is a thing, though not very widely publicized, so far. That’s about what I would expect, all things considered.
Some of my convictions seem to have little to do with my witness, and more to do with how I’m supposed to get things done. But I pray about that a great deal, so apparently God is humoring me and giving me direction in my convictions that becomes more clear by the day. This puts me in territory that tends not to be shared with too many other folks. Still, sometimes I sense that it may have wider effects.
In a few months, I will cancel my MS Office 365 subscription. I’m not sure why, but I’m being driven to get away from using that. Maybe I’ll have most or all of my books revised by then — I sure hope so. But if the Lord wants me to pray for a Chromebook, it should be obvious that He’s going to sponsor a shift to Google Docs. Much as I hate Google in general, I’ve long sensed that this move would come. I’m glad I waited, because I would have gone about it with mistaken ideas about the purpose. Somehow, the Lord intends to use such an account for His glory, and it’s important to get as close to the target as possible before pulling the trigger. What looks like a bullseye from way back turns out to be a distraction, and the bullseye was hiding behind something else.
By the way, a Chromebook has been ordered and it’s on the way. We’ll see what it can do when it gets here. Yeah, I’ll post a picture of it here.
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure why I needed one. As I was seeking His face about it, the answer seemed to be that I would be working with a real-world faith community, and the Chromebook was for that purpose. I still need the paper and pencil stuff, but there are certain things that won’t work that way. Something about the nature of the group will require such a device, something that the other stuff I already have cannot do. That’s all I know for now.
I’m not sure if any of this represents another one of those changes that I sense now and then, as if God saw where certain people were going, and then let me know that it called for a revision in methods and means. Keep in mind: This kind of stuff clearly isn’t that important, in the sense that it doesn’t make much difference from God’s perspective. “Oh, you really want that? Fine, here you go.” And then because it’s a major figure on the human level, it cascades back down on all the little people, including us. Except we get to sense in our spirits when it happens, even if nobody is reporting it. It doesn’t change our mission, only some of the methods.
Yeah, I really believe that. He’s waiting for certain people to decide how they want to be a fool, and then He tells us what to expect as we are going about the really important business that is far more dear to Him. It’s the business that most of the world never notices. They think their big plans really matter. We have to live with their plans, but only as the background noise that accompanies our witness of the gospel.
I’m quite certain sometime in the next few months I’ll have to forget Microsoft, but it has been a convoluted path. I’m not the only person who senses that something from that direction is headed our way. But it’s not the kind of thing that will affect everyone, just some of us. Indeed, I tend to believe my wife will be just fine with her Windows machines. She’s not doing what I have to do, and vice versa, though we are very much a team.
At any rate, it’s not time just yet for me to shift, so I’ll wait until I get that signal. The way I see it, I’ll be dodging a bullet meant for others. Meanwhile, I have to keep using it until I get certain things done. Maybe I can stop looking back; maybe I don’t have to move back and forth as I’ve done over the past year or so. I’m willing to go through all the hassles and jump through all the hoops, but I keep praying I get some relief at some point on stuff like this. It feels like a distraction.
I think I’m almost numb to most of it now. I don’t love Linux and I don’t hate Windows. I really don’t like computers all that much, but the Lord isn’t ready to let me put that tool down just yet. I simply would like to pick one or the other and set the matter aside.
So, do you reckon you get that strong sense of conviction that the Lord is going to do something big with face-to-face outreach soon? If the economy collapses anywhere near as much as I expect, it’s going to bring changes no human can predict. The Lord will take care of us, I’m quite certain, but it will be tribulation, for sure.
