Honoring God In Our Flexibility
At the end of Spring Break Camps, we asked our participants a simple question: Has SOS impacted your relationship with God? Our hearts lept when we read this response:
“Yes! I have learned to be flexible and willing to follow where the Holy Spirit leads when it is outside what I have planned”
This cut right to the heart of what we hope for when someone engages with SOS: an encounter with God, a call to service, Gospel kindness, dynamic compassion, rich community, other-worldly joy and hope.
We recognize that our posture can be one of the truest communicators of our values. So, yes, flexibility is a takeaway we celebrate.
Of course, some things at SOS aren’t flexible. For example: Summer campers! Get out of that cozy bunk and be ready for breakfast: G-O-O-D-M-O-R-N-I-N-G, GOOD MORNING! #iykyk.
Yet, at SOS...
Being flexible allows us to honor the Holy Spirit’s presence and work, recognizing that our best-laid plans are worth being adapted, even scrapped, when the Spirit is moving and pointing or pulling us into an unplanned holy moment.
Being flexible allows us to honor the image-bearers, aka people, around us and care for each other well. We can communicate that people are more important than to-do lists or timers! Listening or caring or sharing aren’t listed on our daily camp schedule, but there’s nothing on the schedule more important than moments like those.
“That we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.” Brother Lawrence
And beyond flexibility in the small daily moments, being flexible with my life and plans allows me to honor that God may answer my prayers to “Use me, guide me, and give me a future as an invested Kingdom citizen!” in ways that I haven’t already laid out for myself. What if God calls me to a new place via a new path at an unplanned time? I hope I’m flexible enough to see and follow.
I can practice being that flexible child of God in the small moments of today, wherever I may be and whomever I’m doing my day with.
“God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.” Tish Harrison Warren
Being flexible can be a statement of our open-handedness to the will of God, even if that flexibility is called of us right in the middle of our best-laid plans.
Being flexible can be a statement of love to our neighbor, even if that flexibility requires us to show grace and kindness in honoring another’s priorities instead of our own.
Being flexible can be a statement of humility, even if that flexibility is called upon in a moment where I just really want to do what I want to do.
Being flexible can be a statement of love to our Father, taking joy in following His voice and following as He leads.
What if in our willingness to be flexible, we invite another element of the posture that Jesus rocked His community with? The willingness to see the people around us, to honor each other by stopping the play clock and to practice seeing, hearing, and valuing.
“[Being a Christian] is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God.” Rachel Held Evans
How could there be more important work than that for those of us who seek to be harbingers of the Kingdom Jesus has invited us to be a part of? A Kingdom where each of us is an image-bearer and treated as such?
Maybe a little flexibility is a Kingdom characteristic we can practice today.
This post was written by Ally Velderman, SOS Director of Camps and Programs