What’s the next thing?
That’s a powerful question. It deserves at least a bit of attention, especially from those of us who feel a call to serve and lead Jesus’ church. Without answering that question, we get a bit stale, we atrophy. To put it another way, we miss the million ways that the Spirit is speaking in the moment, or moments, and in doing so, actually miss God’s guidance.
God is always at work (John 5:17), and that work is often coming in forms that certainly seem new and surprising. Without wrestling with the question ‘what’s next?’ we miss the very present work of Jesus. Now, we may in fact be a part of some of His work without the question, but there’s no doubt that we will miss some of it, or even worse, be on the wrong side of God’s work just like the Pharisees who had studied the scriptures, but failed to see the Word of God when it was standing in front of them!
‘What’s next’ is the mirror of ‘what is.’ We need to wrestle with both. But it seems to me that a good portion of the church has missed seeing both because it could not envision the tomorrow that the coming kingdom contains. ‘What’s next’ is a good way to engage the coming kingdom, and to prayerfully consider what God may be doing. Asking the question doesn’t ‘make it happen,’ rather, it puts you and I in a position to see things where we were previously blind.
This is the essence of the dreaming heart. This is the essence of the divine image that God has placed upon humanity—the ability to live in ‘what is’ and lay hold of ‘what isn’t’ or, better still, ‘what could be.’
God’s kingdom is coming, the question is this—who can see it?
