PrimeSample

CHANGING YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES

Sometimes it can feel like your life is anything but prime. In fact, it often feels the opposite. That’s because many of us reading these words feel like our life falls into one of three types of categories—ordinary, dysfunctional, and tragic. You feel like your life is either ordinary and nothing special, falling apart and dysfunctional, or tragic because of an unforeseen event.

So what do you do with this? If you want to live the prime life, what do you do when your circumstances are ordinary, dysfunctional, or even tragic, and you feel like this is what is standing between you and the life God wants for you? Well, God doesn’t promise to change your circumstance.

Take the story of Joseph, for example. First, his brothers sold him in slavery, and then he was set up by Potiphar’s wife and thrown into prison for a crime he didn’t commit. And yet, he winds up being put in charge of the prison because the Lord was with him! And it was from here that God was setting the stage for what was to come. Eventually God would connect Joseph with the Pharaoh’s cupbearer. He would enable Joseph to correctly interpret a dream for him. This in turn made its way to Pharaoh who some time later had a dream that he needed interpreting. So God gave Joseph an audience with Pharaoh himself straight from prison. God is with Joseph again to interpret Pharaoh’s dream, and Pharaoh is so moved by how God is with Joseph that he makes a crazy decision:

So Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I hereby put you in charge of the whole land of Egypt.” Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his finger and put it on Joseph’s finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck. 43 He had him ride in a chariot as his second-in-command, and people shouted before him, “Make way!” (Genesis 41:41-42)

Joseph becomes second in command of the most powerful nation on earth. You want to talk about the prime life. Oh man, this guy lived it. You better believe that when Joseph looked back on his life he didn’t think it was small or ordinary. No way. It was more than he ever dreamed of.

And here’s the deal: that would never have happened if God simply changed his circumstances when Joseph wanted him to. That’s why God did something better: he used them. And that’s what you need to know: often God doesn’t want to change our circumstances; he wants to use them. Your circumstances aren’t an annoyance or an inconvenience to God, no they’re probably the very thing he’s going to use, against all odds and against all expectations, to lead you where he wants you to be.

So your job, and a huge next step in pursuing the prime life, is to change your approach to your current circumstances. Here are three ways you can do that:

1. See them through God’s eyes. Close your eyes on ordinary, dysfunctional, and tragic, and open them with the lens of “what could God do here?!?” What does God see here? If he took Joseph from prison to the prime life, what does he want to do with this?

2. Make a plan for them. Make a plan for how you are going to take over the world from where you are right now. Don’t wait for some lottery ticket to come along. That’s not how God works most of the time. Most of the time his plan is not to change your circumstances, but use them. So we have to be ready. We have to start tuning in. How is God going to take something meant for evil and use it for something beautiful and big?

3. Do the best you can with what you have. Change the way you see your circumstances. Make a plan for them. And then just do the best you can with what you have. Do the best you can, just like Joseph, and trust God to bless it.