Two strangers were fishing opposite each other on a beautiful Idaho trout stream. At sunset the younger fisherman went to greet the older fisherman on the far side of the stream. He was perplexed that the older fisherman had thrown back the big fish he caught throughout the day.

“If you don’t mind me asking”, he said, “I noticed you threw back the biggest fish I have ever seen.  Am I missing something?”

The older fisherman lifted his hat, scratched his head and said, “Well sonny, to be honest, the big fish don’t fit my pan.”

New vision is a challenging part of life, particularly in our mature years. We want things to be the old familiar way, to fit our tastes and rules.  “We have always done it that way.”   If it doesn’t fit our pan, out it goes!   But, “He gave His only begotten Son so that he that believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” Ours is not a God whose vision for us fits in a small pan my Christian friends.
In our humanity, we all share in this limitation of small mindedness when, just like the old fisherman, we cling unknowingly to the habits of our willfulness and limited thinking because we have always done things a certain way.  I have learned to let go of the familiar and seek to know God’s will for me.  The rewards of God’s unconditional love have been much bigger than anything I imagined for myself and certainly very different from what I was used to when I lived solely from the limitation of my own mind.  Unknowingly, I rejected the bigger plans the Lord had for me.
For example, my new unplanned life in Ocala has rather surprised me as it has unfolded this year. It has not been without health challenges, but the Lord has blessed me with a good farm to afford to board my elderly horses, a new ministry, a new puppy Bella, a reconstituted relationship with my brother, visits from friends from the North, a comfortable home and yard and neighbors and a new church home. ( I am trusting the health challenges will be answered in prayer.)
If we love Him in our heart and let go of our willful mind, even at this age and time of life, there is so much more to come than one can imagine.  As that great hymn states: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine! Perfect submission, perfect delight, visions of rapture now burst on my sight.”  Please take it from me if you can; get rid of that outdated small frying pan the old fisherman used to measure his abundance, and open to the vision of God’s delights through your heart. Our God is a great God with fantastic vision for us and our human thinking quite honestly, is just too small. We cannot enter God’s kingdom on our thinking but only through our heart. If you are not doing so already, live from the heart of Christ; not the smallness of that frying pan. The abundance of life He promises is more than we can ever realize.

Doris
“The things that God has prepared for those who love him are beyond human comprehension and imagination.”  (I Corinthians 2:9).