Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, friends, old and new. It's Ramsey here. You know that old expression, it's my way or the highway? You don't hear that one very often anymore. At least not out loud. Well, I was listening to some worship music the other day, and I thought I heard the lyric my way or the higher way. I stopped and was like, wait a minute. Was that a dad joke? I mean, I make dad jokes all the time. Since my kids are both away at college now, I just make dad jokes to whoever is unlucky enough to be standing nearby. But a dad joke baked into a worship song. Actually, no, they didn't sing that. It was just the phrase higher way. But it got me thinking, do I try to do things my way or the higher way? My way is obvious. It's the way that I want to do things for me, to serve my own benefits. But the higher way, that would be God's way. What God wants. Do I even know what the higher way is? How do I know what God wants? In Isaiah 55, God tells us that his thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways.
[00:01:08] For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. And it's beautiful, because God goes on to describe how his word comes down from heaven and waters and nourishes the land and creates peace and goodness and the success of his purpose. But I want what I want. We all want what we want, right? And it's a constant question, how can I get what I want? How can I be successful and happy and rich and famous? Maybe the world has all kinds of things to say about how to get what you want, how to become rich and famous. The world says, choose the thing that you are most passionate about and work really hard. Don't take no for an answer. Use the power of positivity. Visualize it. It's the secret. Manifest it. Whatever you set your intentions upon will become yours. Scripture has a different take on things. Of course. The Bible says that we should love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We should set all of our passion and work and intention on loving and knowing God, not upon pursuing the things that we want on this earth. Scripture also tells us that when we seek God's will and work towards God's will, then all things are possible. The world says that we should chase our dreams in order to make them real. Let's talk about dreams for a minute. Actually, my daughter is really awesome. One of the cool things about my daughter is that ever since she was little, she's had lucid dreams, like all the time.
[00:02:39] One day when she was a little kid, she told me, dad, I dream every night. I know that I'm dreaming, and sometimes I can wake myself up, but mostly I'm just dreaming and stuff is happening all around me. Is that normal? So I told her that was called lucid dreaming, and most people only got that once in a while, if ever. So it was really special that it happened to her on the regular. But here's the thing, I said, leaning over with my eyes real big and my voice kind of hushed. If you know you're dreaming, then you can control your dreams.
[00:03:09] Wow. I told her, everything that you believe will happen in a dream does happen. Have you ever noticed that? So if you believe that when you turn around, there will be a unicorn and you can pet it, then it will happen. And if you believe you can fly, then you can step right off the ground into the air. I was not making this up. I had figured that out about dreams. Of course, for me it was because I would see a spider in my dream and think, oh, no, there's a spider. It's going to jump onto my face. And sure enough. But I didn't tell her that exactly. So the next day she told me it worked. She could now control her dreams. That's totally different from our real lives, though. Dreaming. I have to wonder if maybe heaven will be like a lucid dream, where maybe we have such unity and connection to God that everything we believe and want to come true does come true. I don't know. But while we're still on this side of heaven, I think there will be lots of things that we want that likely God doesn't want and certainly that other people don't want. What happens when someone else, maybe someone that you love, wants something different from what you want? Someone recently asked me a profound question. How do you love and welcome something that you don't want, especially if it is something that a loved one wants for themselves or for both of you, and it doesn't line up with how you wanted it? Certainly it is difficult. Likely it will be painful, or at least bittersweet. Naturally, it will lead to questions like, what's best? What's best for them. For me, then, hopefully it will lead to questions and soul searching, like, what does God want? What is God's will for them? And for me, those will likely be difficult questions to answer or perhaps put a different way. They might be easy answers, but extremely difficult to accept. Then we get right back to where we started. It's either my way or the higher way. When and if we can line up our way with the higher way, find God's will and agree with it, that's when we can have faith that God will answer prayer and provide, and that his word will pour out upon the land and upon us like rain. We won't get everything we want, but we will get what he wants. And what he wants for us is good. And for today, that is enough.
