If it’s any consolation to anyone, I am not a very good advice-giver.
It’s very strange because I feel like I should be good at it considering how I am a youth pastor, Cru leader, sometimes worship leader, discipler. I should give freakin’ awesome advice shouldn’t I? Okay, so maybe the problem isn’t that I give bad advice, but that people don’t actually care to receive what I have deemed to be the greatest advice EVER. And when I give them advice, and I see them continually screwing up their lives, I think that I have contributed to the cause of it.
Have you ever met a person who is making terrible life choices and all you want to do is slap them up the side of their head and yell, “What are you doing?! Stop!” You want to physically tie them to a chair because it seems like it’s the only way you’re going to get through to them. That’s not true, of course because it would only make them scared of you. Who wants to listen to a crazy person, anyways? I certainly don’t. Although, I must say that I do read a lot of books from psychotic, gloomy authors.
I talk to a lot of girls about their problems, so let’s just say that all the girls have been morphed into one person and are called “X.”
X is telling me her problems and you know what? We’ve talked about these exact same problems before, in which I have told her the Godly thing to do in the situation, and she has agreed with me. She has walked out of that location with confidence that she is going to do the right thing and determination to live it out. I have usually patted myself on the back for being a good mentor. Then, we meet up again a week later in which X tells me how everything went horribly wrong.
And what do I get? I get FRUSTRATED. “Why are people so dumb?” I think.
And then I feel like a screw up for being a bad friend, a bad mentor, a bad advice-giver. I feel hopeless and helpless because all I can do is pray and it feels like it’s not good enough. The problem is, I don’t just want to help these friends, I want to save them. But, I can’t. I can’t save anyone.
So, I’m thinking about how stupid everyone is on my drive home, continually congratulating myself for making wise decisions when all of a sudden I get a reality check from God deposited directly into my soul bank account.
“Hey Faith!”
“Hey God! What’s up?”
“I know you feel super frustrated with how your friends are making poor choices.”
“Ugh! I know! Crazy, right? They’re so stubborn. I just wish they’d listen.”
“Me too. Oh . . . yeah . . . by the way, remember how you hate listening to me?”
“What?! Me hate listening to you?”
Then, I remember that just a couple days earlier, I had been praying to God about a specific situation. I had been asking God for guidance, and He made it pretty clear as to what I was supposed to do. Led me to scriptures. Put Godly people in my life to advise me. And you know what I did? I desperately tried to ignore EVERYTHING. I put my fingers in my ears and sung a little tune to clear out the voices. La-di-da-di-da.
So, the reality check has been deposited into my account, when I feel a withdrawal taking place from it too — my pride.
“Well shoot! I guess me feeling frustrated over my friend’s poor decisions are how you feel when I disregard YOUR advice, isn’t it God?”
“Oh. You have no idea how many people ignore MY advice.”
It’s kind of funny.
We can get so angry when we watch our family members do stupid things. We can get frustrated when that friend is constantly going back with that jerk of a boyfriend because she “loves him.” We can get irritated at the midnight phone calls that person in church gives us because they need help. We can get annoyed at it all, but the thing that I’ve learned is that even though we do the same thing to God, the EXACT same thing to God, He doesn’t treat us as we deserve. He doesn’t walk out on us and tell us, “Get it right next time or I’m gone.” He doesn’t hang up the line when we call. He isn’t too busy to talk with us at 3 am.
And we’ll continue doing stupid things throughout our lives, but God is always going to be there. I don’t know why. And unlike me, God CAN save us. He can save me.
So maybe when X comes knocking around again, the only thing to do is to listen and to keep telling the truth. God keeps telling me the truth. We’ll either listen or we won’t.
I pray we both learn to listen.
Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.
Proverbs 15:22
Faith
faith goes to college 