This is a guest post from my son Nate (www.nateedmondson.com). Wish I had written this:
A popular phrase that gets tossed around in church world a lot is the phrase “God thing”. A God thing is when something happens that can’t be explained and it becomes apparent that God was behind the scenes working everything out. Real God things are very incredible and can really change people’s perspective on who God is, but I think the church as a whole has started to become too quick to label stuff “God things”.
I don’t want to publicly criticize anyone in particular, so I’m going to try and be careful with this explanation, but the reason I started thinking about this whole “God thing” idea is because of a recent use of the phrase that I thought seemed a little skeptical. There was an event that had been planned for months and about a week or so before a few details hadn’t been worked out yet. Thankfully everything ended up working out and the event was a success. After the event was underway and all systems were functional one of the leaders of this event made the statement, “man.. it’s just really a God thing. We had a lot of last minute details fall through on us and I’m just so pleased God worked everything out to his glory..”
I don’t mean to be judgemental or criticize the intent of this person’s heart, but it seems to me like this is an example of where the phrase “God thing” is not exactly relevant. A God thing is when something unexpected happens and God works everything out in a supernatural, unexplainable way; not when the person in charge is lazy and neglects the responsibility that GOD gave them, and then manages to throw something together at the last minute and the final result is just ok.
God things are amazing miracles… not an excuse for poor planning.
Bottom Line: Leaders in the church world don’t get to work less and not stress over details simply because they’re expecting a God thing; a Godly leader does everything to his or her ability and then lets God work out what they have no control over. A detail that was never thought through is not a detail that can be rescued by a God thing.
