I love getting to learn new skills. One of the skills I’ve learned over the past decade or so has been a very rudimentary understanding of a couple of coding languages. I don’t know anywhere near enough to write more than a few very basic components of code. Nor do I know how to do any major troubleshooting if something is wrong. But, I know enough to make minor tweaks and updates to existing code or to solve very basic problems.
The nice thing about code is that problems can often be fixed by adding or removing one single character. Of course, that’s also the bad thing about code. If something’s wrong, it could be off by one single character, which can be tough to find.
Either way, though, it’s objective. It’s a logic problem. Creating code and solving problems might be a headache (okay, so no “might” to that — there’s always some form of headache when it comes to coding, it’s just a matter of how big the headache is), but it’s still formulaic.
How tempting is it to try to approach life that way? To believe that we can solve anything and everything if we can just find the right button to push?
And, in all honesty, we do approach life that way. Our self-help books and marketing show this to be true.
Follow these steps and you can write and sell your book.
Choose this path, and you can achieve your dream job.
Take these supplements or follow this plan and you can get healthy and skinny.
Do this with your children and they’ll turn out brilliant and successful and perfect.
If you would just do it my way using my tips and tricks and products, everything will be just perfect.
Except it won’t. Life doesn’t work that way. Life is not code. Life is subjective and messy, and what works perfectly in one situation doesn’t work in another.
On the one hand, I like that because it gives me freedom to say, “I’m glad that works for you, but it’s just not me.” On the other hand, though, I do wish I had a formula. I wish I could just insert the right code and have everything fall into place for my husband, my children, and myself. I wish I could just follow a plan and have everything work perfectly for our church. I wish I could just say the right words in prayer and have my prayer journal be filled with answers to prayer instead of requests that seem to stubbornly stay unanswered.
There’s no perfect code, and it’s annoying. There’s no perfect motivational trick, and it’s exhausting. There’s no way to fix things, and it’s heartbreaking.
But, there’s God. There is an all-powerful, perfect, just, righteous, and holy God who is also loving and intimate and close. There’s a God who is always constant and whose character doesn’t change, but whose character includes so much creativity that He doesn’t have to act the same way twice. He can keep us surprised. Keep us, by necessity, trusting in Him.
That trust is hard sometimes. Serving a God whose creativity is that big means we cannot predict, cannot solve, cannot logic our way through the circumstances of life because His ways are too big to fit into those boxes. That’s really the essence of trust, though. Giving up our right to the ability to figure out solutions on our own. To surrender to His ability instead.
To wait. To watch. To rest. To abide.
No, there’s no perfect code. And for someone who likes to logic and checklist their way through things, that can be hard.
But it’s also good. Because creative love is better, and the love of God is the greatest of all. I’ll trust in that.
