Leave Your Schedule at Home

What a supernatural time we had this past weekend at Refresh! When we have an encounter with the Father like we had, it makes all the months of planning so worth it. Everybody on our amazing team had a significant role to play and they prepared and executed it beautifully.

Two days prior to the retreat, I finalized the schedule and listed out in detail what each session would entail. The day of the retreat, I pressed through every obstacle to make my way to the location only to later realize I left the schedule at home. I created it on my desktop at my office, printed out a couple copies, put it in my work bag, and totally forgot to take the papers out of my bag to put them with the other items for the retreat. 

When I created the schedule I saved it to a jump drive, so, there was nowhere to access it online. I didn’t email it to anyone, so there wasn’t a copy in my sent items that I could pull up. It was printed, on paper, in a bag, in my room, at my house, miles away, and it was nearing time to get started.

I grabbed one of the skeleton schedules that I had provided the attendees and attempted to remember the details of the original schedule I had created, but only a few things came back to my memory, and I wasn’t even sure of the order I originally had those things in. There were a couple of sessions that were completely blank, and I literally had no thoughts of what would take place during those times.

So, what did I do? I started the retreat with what I knew, and I trusted God with the rest. I didn’t try to hide the fact that I left the schedule at home. I was honest about it. I told the team before we started, and I shared it with the attendees during our first session together. And you know what happened? Because I didn’t have my schedule, it made room for His schedule. Because I wasn’t trying to stick to my plan, it required me to continuously ask, “Okay, Lord. What do you want to do next?” We ended up doing things I never could have planned, and we ended up not doing things that I did plan. 

Just this morning the Holy Spirit reminded me how this has come full circle for me. Years ago, while standing in the middle of a room teaching a big group of people, the Holy Spirit whispered to me, “You’re so scheduled, you leave no room for Me.” Since that day, I have purposed to make room for Him. Yes, I plan and I prepare. I even create a schedule. But when you live a life being led by The Spirit, there’s no need to panic when you leave your schedule at home.

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