Seeing Clearly

When I started playing the guitar, my motivation could best be summed up as a short but embarrassing mantra: “Chicks dig musicians.” I sat for days on end learning to play a song that I hoped would impress at least one of the girls I went to school with. But despite my futile attempts to sing a girlfriend into existence, God was already at work on a much bigger plan. My big plan was to woo someone with a cheesy love song.

Now I see that God’s plan is much bigger, including opportunities to play with some of my best friends for worldwide television audiences, lead worship for masses of youth and young adults, perform in Europe and North America, and make new friends everywhere I go.

My plan concluded with what I hoped would be a date to the Junior-Senior banquet. But it still amazes me to see how much more God has included in His plan for my life.

One of the big themes in my last album, Less is More, is the idea that we need to learn to trust our own planning less and rely more on God’s guidance in our lives. I’m still learning to do it, and it takes practice. After my wife and I moved from Michigan to Texas, we realized how much extra stuff we had. So we had a garage sale. What we couldn’t sell, we gave away. To this day, we keep finding stuff around the house that we don’t really need—or have room for. But I guess that’s how life is. You keep accumulating stuff, and you learn day by day to sort out what things are still important and which things are worth tossing.

Seeing the Extraordinary

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that more often than not, it takes time and patience to see the real beauty of God’s work in our lives, and it often comes in more simple ways than we imagine. Paul talks about this kind of thing when he says, “Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now” (1 Corinthians 13:12, NLT). In other words, the stuff that makes up everyday life can make it difficult for us to see God at work. But as we grow and mature in faith, by God’s grace, we begin to see extraordinary things in what might otherwise be viewed as ordinary parts of our lives.

My prayer for myself, and for anyone who stumbles across my music, and anyone who doesn’t, for that matter, is that we learn to see more clearly the amazing things that God is doing in the midst of our everyday experiences.

Listen to Elia King

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Elia King writes from Colorado.

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