Take Inventory

Tis the season for declaring, proclaiming, restating and announcing. I ain’t mad at nobody. After all, it’s 2020, a year we’ve heard about for literally decades. We are less than half the month in, and perhaps you may still be in vision board mode, determining what this year should be for yourself, or even like me, still in your head and not yet pinned to paper. Whichever the case, you might want to first take inventory of what you’ve got. All me to explain.

I love Macs, but I know they ain’t for erebody! LOL! But since the company elected to create a design with less ports, there were many access points for plugging in other devices. For example, I often prefer to plug in my Fitbit for charging, a USB and my phone. Yet my current configuration on my Mac doesn’t allow that. So, I’m checking the battery life and making charging determinations based upon said data. It can get confusing and a little frustrating from time to time, which slows down my productivity and my ability to maximize performance of my gadgets. Recently, one afternoon, which I was searching my backpack for the adaptor that I have that allows me to engage in one practice, I found an adaptor of some sort that had multiple ports – more than the one I typically used. I don’t know how long I’ve had it, or carried it in my backpack, but it’s been a minute. I never took the time to explore it. I just threw it in my bag and carried on. For over a year, I’ve been engaged in a futile game of switch up, when in reality, I had all I needed, actually more than I needed all along.

We spend an inordinate amount of time thrashing ourselves around physically and perhaps more significantly in our minds and our thoughts about what we don’t have. We don’t always take inventory of the plethora of times God demonstrated His love and His grace over our lives, surprising us with opportunities and abilities to do the unimaginable. Each of us has an abundance of “yes and Amens” for God literally blowing our minds. We’ve not always prepared ourselves. Sometimes we’ve procrastinated. Sometimes we’ve understudied, and dare I say, sometimes, we’ve never studied at all. L But God. When God has decided that we are chosen to be His vessel for a specific task in the earth, He will complete the assignment through us whether we’ve been deliberate in preparation or not. Jeremiah 1:5-9 affirms, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” “Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”

But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord. Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth. 10 See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

In other words, God is not worried about our excuses, because He has equipped us before we entered earth. We need to engage in our own inventory. What do we have? What have we had? What is sound? What needs retooling? What needs redistributing? What needs alignment, awakening and anointing? As likened to my adaptor situation, we already have all we need. For literally over a year, I’ve been operating below my privilege, with devices that were less powerful, because I’d not created space to properly supply them to their source. The same is true with us. When we fail to take inventory of what God has supplied to us, we are left ineffective in our purpose, thereby operating below the privilege granted to us at Calvary. God promises to direct our gifts, our energy and our efforts, as we yield ourselves to His mighty hand. Once we connect to that truth, there is nothing we cannot do through Christ who strengthens us.