If God is your Father, then that means that God is your coach.
What is a coach? A coach is someone invested in empowering you to succeed. He wants you to win. When you stumble, He picks you up, dusts you off, and gets you back into the game. When you don’t believe in yourself, He believes in you. He sees potential in you that you don’t see. He will draw a level of performance out of you that you didn’t know you had in you.
Let me tell you a story of how this came into focus for me.
I was behind on my mortgage. I’m self employed. I don’t get a regular paycheck. My income is somewhat unpredictable. Anyway, I was behind on my mortgage.
I had every confidence that God could supply what I needed. I had seen Him do so many times before. But this time was different. This time, for some reason, I believed He wouldn’t. I believed that I had screwed up—somehow, and He was just going to make me sit in the mess I had created.
I felt horrible.
As I focused in on what was going on inside me, I came to this place in my childhood. I was about eight years old. My dad had been away of a remote military deployment for a year and he was coming home. While he was away, I was playing with his tools—his hammers, saws, wrenches, pliers, whatever. The only problem was this: my dad was very particular about how his tools were to be put away. And I was clueless on how to follow his system.
As we counted down the days to my dad’s return, dread filled me. When he finally did come home, one of the first things he did was yell at me because I left his shovel out in my sandbox.
I had screwed up, and I didn’t know how to fix it.
But here God spoke to me. He said, “Your dad used the parenting tools that were in his parenting toolbox. I’m a different kind of dad. I have different tools. When you don’t know what to do, I come along side you and help you.”
Wow! All the angst I felt about that mortgage instantly vanished. In its place was this beautiful anticipation: God is going to help me. He will show me how to win.
Of course, the money came in, the mortgage got paid, everything was fine.
God is our coach.
More next time…
