The Failure of Formulas

“The truth is there are a million steps, and we don’t even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers, bullet points, 3 step formulas, magic mantras, or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy, and His love.”
-Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What


This is a something I have been learning since our arrival in Chile. I will be honest and say that these last few weeks have been challenging and difficult and yet amazing at the same time. We dropped everything and came here in faith because we knew that we knew that God had called us here. We even bought our tickets before we had any arrangements of where we would stay or what we would do.

Since God led us here to Pichilemu, He has blessed us with some great friendships here and we are working hard there are a lot of ministry opportunities here, but it hasn’t been easy. We’ve encountered many obstacles here and we’ve had to wrestle out some things with God and I suppose that somewhere in my mind I figured that we had sacrificed so much to come here that we deserved to have it a little easy, that God would… hook us up, and I so found myself disappointed when He didn’t.


Everything that we had been relying on was being stripped away and it was a painful process. I know that God had to do this in us in order to shift our reliance onto Him and when it was only God that was left we found that He alone was reliable.

We have learned and we’ve been stretched and I know that we are in a larger plan than I can understand or arrange for. The truth is that we are constantly changing, growing and facing new challenges and joys. All these things grow us and make us different people than we were before.

“The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it” 1 Thes. 5:24.