Choosing Faith Over Fixing

November 07, 2018

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” - John 15:5

Any fellow fixers out there? Excuse me while I use this post to preach to myself!

I’m pretty much the Joanna Gaines of finding solutions or fixing a situation for myself or my loved ones. My personal motto for just about anything is summed up as “if you don’t like it, fix it.” You don’t like your job? Let’s update your resume and search LinkedIn together. You don’t like the state of your relationship? Let’s read books, plan activities and listen to podcasts to help it thrive. You want to get healthier? Let me help you make a meal plan and workout schedule to set you up for success.

I want the best for the people I love and will stop at nothing to help them live a life to that potential. And while my heart may start in the right place, I find that when I place too much confidence in myself to fix or know the right answers without taking it to God first, things go south pretty quick. Because we were never meant to have it all figured out. God created us for dependency, and regardless of how capable we think we are at the time, we have to put our pride aside and slow down long enough to take our burdens (and our plans) to the cross in prayer.

John 15:5 says that if we abide in the Lord we will bear fruit, but if we try to go it alone we will come up lacking. That means a solution without His counsel is short-lived, a plan without His advisement lacks direction, and any word spoken without regard to His will is barren. I don’t know about you, but I want my life and the lives of my people to bear fruit!

When we place too much faith in our own abilities to fix, we’re like a plant grown in shallow soil; our solutions may spring up fast but they’ll die just as quickly. However, when we get our direction from the Lord we’re like a tree planted by water. Even when the droughts come, we will bear fruit because God is the ULTIMATE fixer.

Challenge: Before we go into fix-it mode, let’s choose prayer over our pride. While He may use that prayer to confirm an answer in our hearts, He could also use that moment to shift our thinking and lead us to a better answer.
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