An act of faith God has assigned to your life will draw attention. For too long, you have worried what others will think. That fear has drawn a line before you and you have not crossed its prohibition. You are being called to cross that line and no longer worry about the opinion of others. Something of great significance awaits your obedience.
My grandmother was a very unique person. One day during the depths of the Great Depression my grandfather left their Alexandria, Louisiana home to look for work and never returned. Alone, and now divorced with two kids, my grandmother had few options. She turned her home into a boarding house renting out rooms. Poverty was a daily companion. After her son, my uncle, entered the Navy, my grandmother with my teenage mother in tow left Louisiana to eventually settle in San Francisco where she ran a tavern on Turk Street.
After all the challenges of life that she went through, my grandmother became a survivor and did not care what other people thought about her. A tough life is about survival, not living according to the standards and expectations of other people. When she became too old to run her business in San Francisco, she finally settled near our family in Los Gatos, California. It was there she would live out the remainder of her days.
My grandmother resembled a Flower Child of the Love Revolution five years before the Summer of Love arrived in the late 60’s, minus the marijuana and LSD. She dressed in bright-colored clothing and liked large straw hats. She bought a 1949 Ford pickup truck and decided she did not like the color. She went to the local hardware store and purchased cans of her favorite colors of house paint and proceeded to paint, by hand, her pickup truck.
The front right fender was painted powder blue. The left front fender was pink. The cab was turquoise. The back two fenders were powder blue and violet. It looked like a pre-hippy rig and turned heads whenever she drove through town. It also made me cringe in embarrassment whenever my grandmother drove close enough to my fragile Junior High emotions and my desire to blend in and not be noticed. Why couldn’t my grandmother simply buy a Buick Regal like a normal old person?
A few years later, my grandmother passed away. By that time the Love Revolution was in full bloom. We lived only a 45-minute drive from the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. It was becoming a Woodstock world. No longer was my grandmother’s truck so weird. After my grandmother passed away, my dad listed the truck for sale and it sold in a day, bright colors and all. It was a work of art that now carried value.
I gave you all this history to say that a coming act of your faith will seem out of step with your surroundings and culture. God has perfect timing for the release of this act of faith. It will make a way for a time still to come, like my grandmother’s truck was painted to fit an approaching season in our culture that was not yet imagined. Faith helps you see things not yet visible in this realm. Faith calls unseen things forward and prophetically announces a new future.
Paint the truck of your faith with the brilliant colors of obedience. Drive it around town with confidence. Do not allow the fear and demands of other people to hinder your freedom. Some who are close to you will respond like I did as an immature kid. Don’t let that spoil your ride of faith. In the future, you will be seen as a person who, at the time of your obedience, appeared out-of-step with culture but history will prove you were actually in step with God. Your act of obedience will turn the truck of your faith experience into something of value.
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