I am a teenager, and I want my future to be successful, so I’ve started playing soccer to see if I can achieve something great in the sport. I lack experience and training, but I want to stand out… and I’m afraid that God will say “no” to me….
Dear Friend,
We congratulate you for caring about God’s plan for your life. Unfortunately, you are confused about how to find God’s will. You seem to think that God is just waiting to know what you really want so that He can disappoint you by saying “no.”
That is not how it works for those of us who have a personal relationship with God. We have the advantage of speaking directly to God through prayer and of hearing directly from God through prayer and studying the Bible. We communicate with God and strengthen our relationship with Him so that we are paying attention when He wants us to stop or to go a different direction.
Hermano Pablo had an analogy that he used to explain how we can know what God wants us to do. According to Hermano Pablo, God communicates with us by using a signal such as a traffic light. The light is green most all of the time, but it does occasionally change to red. We are to move ahead in life, following the principles in the Bible, making decisions and working toward goals. Just like driving through all green lights, we just keep going. But when God wants us to do differently, he changes the light to red to get us to stop. Because we are paying attention, we know when He is speaking to us and we know that we have seen a red light.
When God changes the light to red, we feel unsettled about what we are doing or planning to do. No matter how we try and justify our actions or our plan, God uses the voice of our conscience to give us that unsettled feeling.
That said, we can have the same unsettled feeling as the result of anxiety or fear even when we are following God’s will. So how can we discern whether what we are feeling is a red light from God or just an emotional response such as anxiety or fear?
Although we know that God is much more than a friend, let’s imagine that He is like one of our best friends. Is it possible to know how that friend will respond to a given situation? The answer depends on how well we know him and how much time we have spent with him. It is the same with God: when we spend time with Him in prayer and we learn about Him from studying the Bible, we know when He is speaking to us.
So if you like soccer, play soccer. Get the experience and training that you want and need. Play because you enjoy it and because it is healthy exercise. Play to spend time with your friends and to have fun. And don’t worry about whether professional soccer will be your career. Just move ahead one green light at a time.
We wish you well,
Linda