“The wind blows wherever it pleases.” — John 3:8
One of the things men are terrible at is letting go of the plan. We build the goals, the systems, the timelines, and then we get frustrated when life doesn’t honor our schedule. I’ve lived that. For years I white-knuckled outcomes that weren’t mine to control, praying ASAP prayers: God, I need this. Now. On my terms.
There’s a book called Draw the Circle by Mark Batterson — a forty-day prayer challenge. How it works is you write your prayer inside a hand-drawn circle and you come back to it every single day until it becomes reality. This taught me how to change my ASAP (as soon as possible) prayers to ALAT (as long as it takes) prayers. Because the door God opens on his own time is almost always better than the one you planned for yourself.
I went for a run Saturday morning — one of my daily non-negotiables — and I passed a neighbor I’d seen a couple times on the private drive. She was with her husband this time, so I stopped. I introduced myself.
Her husband’s name is Joe. He was one of the founding pastors of a church I’ve known and respected for years. He’s gone on to start a new organization and to write books. The next morning, his wife Trish pulled up with a welcome-to-the-neighborhood basket and Joe’s contact information. I have a podcast studio being built. He was just on a podcast. You see where this is going.
Here’s the thing about that moment: I wasn’t searching for Joe. I wasn’t trying to network my way to the right room. I was just running. Moving. And then a door opened.
That’s how God tends to move. God doesn’t always open the door you asked for. But He always opens the one you needed. The wind blows wherever it pleases. Your job isn’t to control where it goes. It’s to be in sync with its constant motion.
Men, we want certainty before we commit. We want to see the door clearly before we take the first step toward it. But the most significant doors in my life swung open when I stopped trying to engineer the outcome and just kept moving. The Wim Hof retreat in Spain. The Friday mornings with Nick. A run through my own neighborhood. I wasn’t hunting for anything specific. I was just doing the next right thing.
This week’s lesson: Your next door is probably the one you didn’t plan for.
