Restricted Vehicles

A girl stands, hand tightly tucked into her Father’s, at the edge of the ocean, water lapping at her toes and wind whipping her tendrils of hair. She can taste the salt in the air every time she inhales. As far as she can see are vast waters that appear to spread with no end. She looks up at her Father, whose gaze is fixed on her instead of the horizon. He smiles and speaks confidently.

You asked to cross the ocean, and now it’s time. Everything you need is inside of you.

The girl looks one last time at the infinite water, unclasps her hand from her Father’s, and shifts her eyes to the docked boat, taking a step in its direction.

You can’t use the boat.

Spiked heart rate. Panic. It’s a perfectly good boat. A boat designed to keep a passenger afloat and propel them forward on their journey. Why in the world can she not use the boat?

I need you to trust me.

But it’s hard to trust when the boat is the only vehicle in sight, and it’s going to collect dust.

At the end of the churchwide fast, the one in which God spoke to me about pruning, he revealed to me my first branch clipping: social media.

I’m sorry, what?

I figured I must not have heard him clearly. He had just finished speaking to me about stirring up my gifts (II Timothy 1:6) in this new season, one of which is working on my craft of communication through writing and podcasting, and then he ended the week-long fast by asking me to do something counterintuitive to what he just told me to do?

All aspiring authors know that publication is an infinite ocean of competitiveness that most people end up drowning in. Authors also know that it’s imperative that you have an online presence, that that is one piece of the puzzle literary agents and publishing companies examine. They want to make sure you’re the initial spark that can set ablaze a marketing campaign.

And God asked me to pull the plug on the two platforms I use to notify others of my creative content? He wants me to stir up my gifts, but do so in the metaphorical closet?

I would have at least felt like I was wearing water wings if my subscription base was somewhere around 500 people, but when you have less than 50, you feel defeated before you even start. I should just go ahead and put on ankle weights before taking my first step into the ocean.

However, even though the boat is one mode of transportation that can help you get to your destination, it is, in fact, not the only vessel that can accomplish this goal. So what else is there? To be completely honest, I don’t have an answer to that. I see nothing but the boat. The boat I’ve been restricted from using.

This all seems counterintuitive to me. But what I do know is that I serve an unconventional God. A God who uses spit and mud to heal a blind man, a God who uses a bronze serpent on a pole to heal people from venomous snake bites, a God who instructs a man with leprosy to dip down seven times in a polluted body of water to completely heal him.

He never seems to do things the way we think He should. We would choose the path of least resistance. The logical choice. But quite honestly, none of those have worked for me.

So, if you are reading this, you are one of my few faithful subscribers, and I ask only one thing of you: during this upcoming year, if you read something that resonates with you or that you think would be helpful to someone else, please share. Whether that’s with your online audience or an email or text to an individual friend. You are my voice during a time when I have been called to lock myself in the closet.

I’m curious to get to the end of the year and see what God has done through this. And if I know one thing about my God, it’s that it probably won’t look like how I expect it. In fact, I don’t even know what to expect.

But I also wouldn’t trade it for my own way. Every time he has asked me to follow him in obedience, I’ve never ended up with an ounce of regret.

He is, after all, the author of the ocean.