But For Real Though, God?

Today, I had one of those, “I can’t believe I thought that!” moments.  At 6:30pm tonight, the owner of my talent agency called me. He doesn’t call often (usually one of the other agents calls me), but when he calls, it’s usually really important. When he got me on the phone, he said, “You booked a job!”  Then he proceeded to tell me about the TV show that I had book, a show that will be filming for two weeks in Sydney, Australia.  Then he told me how much the job paid, but since this is the Internet and it’s best not to put all your business on it, all I’ll say is that it pays enough to cover my tuition for one year of grad school!  He gave me all of the details, and I didn’t say a word.  I just wrote down what he was telling me.  He was shocked by my response. “You’re not screaming. I just told you that you’re gonna make $$$$ a day, and you’re so calm.”  He was right. I was calm.  But it wasn’t because I have a naturally calm disposition. I was quiet because I didn’t believe him.  He asked, “Well, what do you think? How do you feel?”

And do you know how I responded? I said, “I feel like I’m being punk’d.” And then he told me that I was not being punk’d.  But thinking back, of course he was serious. Agents don’t waste their time calling their clients to pretend that they booked gigs. 

Once I hung up the phone, I allowed the reality of what he had told me to sink in…I began to cry. Could it be true? Could I have booked such a big gig? Could I have amassed, in one phone call, a year’s worth of tuition?  I had prayed that God would give me tuition money, and I wanted to believe it, but it felt unreal. So, I decided not to get my hopes up. In the world of entertainment, it’s common to book a job, only to find out the next week that they decided to hire someone else, or that the project got cancelled, or whatever.  I told myself not to get too excited because it could change at any moment. “Celebrate once you get on the plane,” I told myself.

While praying a few hours later, I saw that I was really reserved in how I thanked God for the job. Normally, I would have jumped up and down, and maybe started to sing a song of praise, but I just sat in my prayer chair, praying quietly. And that’s when I realized that I didn’t believe it.  Yes, my agent had told me that the job was mine (once I passed a physical), but I didn’t believe him.  A part of me feared that the deal would fall through—that the other shoe would drop.  Believing would only cause me unnecessary pain once I found out that the job wasn’t mine.  Suspending belief, however, would enable me to evade pain and disappointment.

And then I realized that this is how I’ve been relating to God as of late.  I haven’t believed what He has told me.  I have listened quietly, and I have suspended belief because I have wanted to protect my heart from believing, just in case God doesn’t come through.

While this is hard for me to write, it is the truth.  I find that I struggle now more to believe God than I ever have before.  But I know that God is not a liar. “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” (Numbers 23:19)  

My challenge is to believe what is promised, but is not-yet.  I figure that if I can choose to trust my agent, who is a man, then surely I can trust God, who is God.  I must remember that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

So today, as an act of faith, I declare to all reading in the blogosphere that I am going to Australia!  Yippee!