Recognising I'm not sovereign

This week is going to be a bit different.  All the normal things are going on; meetings, conferences, preparation, toddlers, preaching, pastoral needs and so on...  But come Thursday I will largely be out of them for the next two weeks.  With my lovely wife having an operation I'm going to be on daddy duty for a couple of weeks.  Someone did ask me if I was looking forward to my holiday - I tried not to give them that look which said 'You clearly don't have 4 children or need to balance their needs with visiting your recovering wife who will be an hours drive away in a hospital ward!'  Not sure how successful I was?

It has made me pause because I am not very good at letting go of things.  I'll no doubt leave a list of things that need doing in my absence, I'll do everything I can to set it up so it runs smoothly without me.  But the fear is about the stuff that simply won't get done, there are things those stepping in or up just don't know.  And straight away it exposes my messiah complex.  I think everyone involved in any sort of ministry has one of these and behind it is the desire to be needed, to be relied upon.  It becomes particularly dangerous if we set the church up so that it has to rely on us.  But I am not the one the church needs to rely on - something which I think is harder for someone who has planted their church to say for all manner of reasons.

You see that is so clearly shown when things start to go differently than we imagined and prayed for.  When people leave and the church shrinks rather than grows, when a project or activity has to fold due to lack of people to man it, and so on...  All of these things show us we are not sovereign.  We can't solve them by just trying harder, or by implementing the latest strategy in the latest 'I grew a church from 2 to 2000 in just one week' book.  God is sovereign and so the only right response is to pray.

An enforced two week break reminds me of that, as I have to set aside the 'I can do' mentality and step back into the 'I can pray' approach which if I'm honest ought to be the only approach but often gets crowded out the the tyranny of the to do list.  I'm praying God will teach me that lesson once and for all in the next two weeks because it's true whether we learn it or not - I am not sovereign.