Episode 101 - The Unfamiliar Places of God

I’m currently in the middle of three weeks that I will spend volunteering at my old college. I have mainly been helping in the kitchen so far. I have never worked in a kitchen before. And before you say it, yes I have cooked before! But working in a kitchen is very different, they have deep fat fryers, and food mixers the size of normal ovens. Everything is much much bigger and most meals are made for at least sixty people as opposed to six at most. And it’s not just the equipment and the scale of everything which was new to me. All of the tasks are new to me too, even the simple things needed to be explained thoroughly so that I understood exactly what I was required to do for each task. 

At first it is quite uncomfortable being in a totally unfamiliar environment, not just not knowing where anything is kept, but also not knowing what most of the stuff there is either! On top of that there is the not knowing how to engage with your surroundings, how to do even simple tasks, not knowing how to do the very work that you are there to do. It must be said that in many of these respects it’s not too dissimilar to doing “missionary” work abroad! I have to say that although not comfortable at first, and a little frustrating, I think it has been good for me.

For most of our lives we spend our times in places that are familiar to us doing things that we have done many times before. Even when we do go to new places or try new things they usually have aspects of familiarity to us and we usually only engage with them for a short time before returning to more familiar places or activities. Being immersed in the unfamiliar for long periods of time has helped remove some of my self-reliance, my pride, my inward focus and my blinkeredness to others. It has helped me to cultivate under used skills, not just cutting carrots and peeling potatoes, but things like asking for help and advice.

There seems to be a sort of sweet spot in the world of the unfamiliar. Just beyond the overwhelming disorder but before familiarity sets in, where something special seems to take place, where all of this seems to happen. And I can’t help noticing that all through our lives God seems to keep bringing us to that place, to new and unfamiliar things. Partly this is undoubtedly because He always has so much more that He wants for us, but I’m also starting to see that perhaps he wants to help keep us in that place; a place where we come to Him rather than looking to our own wisdom for the answers. I just wonder if sometimes I let my own comfort keep me in my familiar places and stop me from following Him into the unfamiliar places of God.