Time for a Change
Why being open to the will of God requires you to make the first move
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“Be opened!”
Mark 7:34
Change is a hard thing. It requires being open to new places, people and situations. It also requires an open mind and an open heart. And for some of us, change is infinitely harder because of the comfort we take in the known rather than the unknown, even if the known is something that is not good for us.
Recently, I started a new job. Not just a new job but a whole new career. Since the pandemic, I had been begging God to change my life, to show me where it is that I could effectuate the most good, and to take me out of the dire circumstances that I was in. After nearly two years of prayer the day came for me to start again.
Being open to the will of God means allowing Him to direct the course of your life without your say
It means giving Him the reigns to place you where you are needed the most. And sometimes it means starting over again with a whole new identity so that God can heal your heart and make you into the disciple that He wants you to be.
Today, if you have been waiting for God to answer a specific prayer of yours, try being open to a new kind of prayer. Not praying for something specifically to happen, but instead asking for your heart to be open to His will. Without an open heart, we can’t receive the blessing. And without the blessing, we cannot bless those around us for whom we were sent.
The mystery of grace is that even that move--change of heart--is still God's move. The first move is grace and our move consent and is represented perfectly by Mary, the Mother of God's fiat to the angel.
God instructs through the Prophet Ezekiel 36:26:
26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Grace is such a beautiful mystery, it differs greatly from the old Proverb system that the righteous will be rewarded for their righteousness and the wicked will be punished. Grace breaks through, it struck Saul of Tarsus blind on the road to Damascus, a person who persecuted the body of Christ, and sent him as Paul on the mission of God.
St. Augustine from his Confessions (Sheed trans):
Late have I loved Thee, 0 Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou were within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou were with me and I was not with Thee. I was kept from Thee by those things, yet had they not been in Thee, they would not have been at all. Thou didst call and cry to my and break open my deafness: and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness: Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do not pant for Thee: I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee: Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.