In The Know

I was meditating on the popular Jeremiah 29:11, bringing myself to be peaceful and content, trusting the plan God had for me. While thinking, I remembered there was something peculiar about the context of this piece of Scripture, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was so I went back to read it. 

In Jeremiah chapter 29, God dictates a letter to Jeremiah directed to those in exile. 

“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease…When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfil my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:4-6, 10-11

I felt as if God was speaking these words directly to me as I read and boy were they right on time. I had received a notification that unsettled me, and I was so close to having an emotional breakdown, adding to this one thing every other thing that was supposedly wrong about my life. But these words stopped me in my tracks. 

I doesn’t make sense for God to tell them to ‘settle down’ in a foreign land while under oppression. God has promised to deliver them, they should live in anticipation of that deliverance, live in tents like when they left Egypt right? They shouldn’t get comfortable, lest they forget. But nope, God says, build, settle, produce and reproduce. Why? Because this season should not decrease them, instead, they should make every effort to grow. The painful seasons where I have not yet received what is promised to me is a season to focus on growth, terribly hard as it might seem.  It is so easy to let these seasons break you, to let them reverse the little you’ve achieved, and to let them put your life on pause.

Your time of waiting is your time to build. To build yourself and your empire, to build relationships and to lay the foundation that the fulfilled promises will rest on. It is a time to settle in who you are and what you bring to the world. This is the time to plant and sow, a fruit and harvest to enjoy later. This is the time to be active and productive, a time to hustle. 

God’s definition of waiting is always active. When Jesus told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit, they didn’t sleep in late and spend the rest of the day staring at the sky. The Bible tells us that they gathered daily to pray, they went on to choose a replacement for Judas. Life was going on while waiting. The Church today is waiting for Christ’s return, but the church today is also going to school, waking up for work, making plans and having babies. Paul was quick to correct the church in Thessalonica when they quit living in the name of waiting for Jesus’ return. We are to live while we wait, to live by faith.

After giving out these instructions, God reaffirms that He will come for them (after seventy years yes, but He will come), that He will fulfill what He promised them, because He has a plan. But it’s not just that God had a plan, but the verse says God knows the plan. He is fully informed with what it is, what challenges it will encounter, what it needs to be executed and who needs to be involved as part of it. His knowledge should give me rest and enable me to trust Him, because if He knows, it’s enough.

God’s plan for my life is good, but that’s the overall definition, there are details of it which will be painful and seemingly negative. I taught the church the other day that God usually reveals the destination but not the way, we learn the way as we follow by faith.

So take heart saints and aints, God is in the know. No matter what you going through, it has no choice but to work out for your good. I need only to align myself with His plan, wait well and trust Him.