I never really liked math. Actually, college algebra cost me my full ride scholarship right out of high school. I needed at least a B and I got a C. I remember seeing my lower than required GPA and crying so feverishly I thought I might throw up. So after my first semester, I dropped out. You can say that me and Algebra aren’t friends! But have no fear, I conquered math later on when I went back and aced all of my math and sciences:-)
I’m more of a literature and journalism kind of girl. It always came really easy to me. Making high A’s or even 100’s on papers was commonplace in my life. I like the artistic, abstract nature of stringing words together. It’s all about rhythm and feeling and not absolutes, like math.
Some people like the concrete nature of math I suppose, like engineers and scientists. They need absolutes to build skyscrapers or develop new medicines. I don’t really understand people like that, but I know they exist(insert laughing emoji).
But I can tell you that no matter if you are a English writer kind of girl like me, or a scientist developing a new vaccine, there is one kind of math that doesn’t make sense to any of us. That my friends , is kingdom math.
Kingdom math doesn’t follow the usual rules. Usually, 2+2 = 4, but in the kingdom 2+ 2 could equal 45 because God tends to multiply things supernaturally, take the fishes and loaves, for example.
Another way of looking at this…….usually we think the way to success or the top=hard work + working our way up the ladder. But in kingdom math, the way up is down. We can try to go up all we want by following the worlds system- go to college, get a master’s at an Ivy League school, work our way up the corporate ladder, promote ourselves, meet the right people etc. But that’s not the way God does things in the kingdom.
God starts with a foundation of humility, adds opportunities for us to serve others, subtracts selfishness from our life by putting us in situations that require us to die to self serving interests and ambition. Sometimes God builds us into the person He wants us to be by adding and subtracting things from us. I’m sure it looks like some crazy hard Algebraic expression with a bunch of variables; something way to complex for my little brain to try and figure out. The point is the thing just doesn’t make sense to us.
In my teenage years, I felt a strong pull to worship music. I felt so strongly that God gifted me to create music and inspire people. I just assumed that everything would be easy and fall into place for me to start touring the world and sharing my songs and I would live happily ever after. Me and my acoustic guitar, tour bus, lots of lattes, husband, child and fairy godmother would ride a magical unicorn around the world singing. 2 + 2=4, right?
Um no. First of all unicorns aren’t real, in case you didn’t know. (I’m still on the fence about fairy godmothers though, I’ll let you know when I make a decision.) But more importantly, my understanding of kingdom math needed work because that is not what happened. Not even close. No I tried and failed, tried and failed many times. Got on my unicorn and fell off before I could even get out of my hometown!
But that’s ok. I needed some humbling to teach me to completely rely on God instead of myself. I needed to serve other people to learn to die to myself so that when the time came I wouldn’t use my platform for selfish reasons. I needed to fail a few times so the ambitious counterfeit dream would crumble and the real dream could live. It was a painful process, but it made me ready for God’s plan and my destiny. So, the kingdom math for my life made no sense at the time, but looking back now I can see it so clearly.
Do you have some kingdom math problems in your own life right now that you can’t solve?? It’s ok to not know the answer. Chill out. Relax and just enjoy your life. Don’t cry over the algebra. Even if you wanted to figure it all out, you can’t. God wants you to trust Him, not necessarily understand Him. I know that’s not what we want to hear, but it’s true. We don’t have to know all of the answers to smile, laugh and enjoy our life a little.
Take it from someone that knows what it’s like to fail miserably at math and at life sometimes. Nothing is worth sacrificing our inheritance of joy and peace. I don’t know a lot of math stuff, but I do know that joy, peace, patience, love, etc are part of the kingdom math equation, and God wants us to enjoy them.
I pray that we all learn to slightly enjoy where we are right now. The algebra can wait, but trust and faith cannot.
