How Much Further?

Every project has an exciting beginning point with dreaming and preparation and then the first step to making it a reality. Hopefully a project has that grand finishing point when the last details are completed and it is ready for use. But every project also has what we call “the middle ground;” that is the dreaded area between the start and the finish where we tend to get exhausted, frustrated and question why we started the project in the first place.

The dreaded middle ground. It seems that we spend most of our lives in the middle ground; that place where we wonder if anything is ever going to get finished. In the middle ground there tends to be a lot of conversations with God that can turn into questioning God. In the middle ground the silence of God can be deafening. “Where is he? What is he doing? Will this ever end?” are typical middle ground dilemmas. And we sit, and we wait, and we sit some more.

God actually addresses all of this when Paul writes, “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). What is God doing in the middle ground? He is “bringing it.” We must understand that God is not limited to our time and space continuum so he stands at the beginning of our struggle and the end of it at the same time. He already sees its completion and so in the middle ground he is “bringing it” and bringing you to the place it all needs to be.

In the middle ground he is intimately involved in shaping us, forming us, resourcing us, leading us, purifying us and transforming us. We may think that the mountain that we are facing is what needs to be worked on, but God knows better. He is also at work moving that mountain in order to accomplish his glory and your best. We need to understand that God certainly knows how to “bring it.”

Our faith declares that God is working even when we can’t see what he is doing. In the middle ground when it seems that our vision is muddled and our every step is laborious the faithful stubbornly cling to the truth that even in the middle ground God is up to something. He is making a message out of the mess.