God's 'economy'

In our society right now, it seems like everyone is thinking about ways to save money. In fact, it's almost trendy to be frugal, to try your best to ensure that none of your hard-earned money is wasted but instead is put to good use. Yet even when we're trying our hardest to be frugal, Americans produce tons and tons of waste every year. Just think about how much plastic packaging, tissue paper, random junk, and leftovers from restaurant meals end up in the dumpster every day! Even at our most frugal, we waste a lot.

Sometimes, I think we imagine God as a "waster" just like us. I know I certainly did. When I first came to seminary several years ago, it seemed to me that all of my musical training (almost 20 years worth) had been wasted. I thought God was calling me into an academic, theological vocation, and at the time I saw no place for music in my life or ministry. But I made a dear friend at seminary, and older (and wiser) woman who was also a musician, who kept saying to me, "God wastes nothing! His economy is perfect!" She encouraged me to trust that somehow, someway God would redeem all those years I spent immersed in music and use them for His purposes.

Well, she was right. About a year after that conversation, I began to get involved with the music team at my church - at first just as a singer, soon as a keyboardist as well. Midway through my second seminary year, the woman who had led the music ministry stepped down... and my pastor asked me to consider co-leading the ministry. Now I have co-lead the music ministry at my church for going on three years, and it is one of the best things in my life! I have seen God bring music back into my life in a form that is much different than I ever expected or wanted, but that is much more beautiful and suits me perfectly. God did not waste my musical training or talents as I feared He would.

God sometimes has a sense of humor in the things in our lives He chooses to "recycle." A couple of years ago I took a course at seminary that prepared me to be a facilitator of the Prepare/Enrich Inventory, a tool for premarital or marital counseling. When I took the class, I was completely convinced that I would never, EVER have the opportunity (or even the desire) to use this tool. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to get married, much less work with all that touchy-feely counseling stuff! So I made it through the class, scoffed ever time I saw the binder of course materials sitting in my closet, and eventually threw away that binder in the course of moving to another apartment.

Irony of ironies, a couple from my church recently got engaged... and my pastor decided to have me administer the Prepare/Enrich Inventory to them as a way to get started on their premarital counseling. I suspect that God is as amused as I am.

In God's wisdom, He uses our gifts and our talents, and He prepares us for the tasks He gives to us. I'm not yet convinced that nothing is wasted in God's economy - I suspect that one effect of the Fall is a whole bunch of waste - but He certainly is a better steward of the gifts, talents, and resources He gives us than we could ever be. I suspect that the longer I work in ministry, the more I will be utterly blown away by the beauty of God's economy.

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As a side note, check out this post on "Gifted for Leadership" about some of the dangers inherent in complementarianism run amok. It would be interesting to write a similar post on the dangers of rabid egalitarianism... but that's a project for another day.