About 2 weeks ago now, my older sister came to the family group chat on whats app to announce that our family dog had been taken away.

We have a thing for dogs in my family so we’ve always had one all through our lives, from childhood to adulthood. We got steward about 4 years ago now and as always, we’d grown an attachment to him and had become so fond of him. It didn’t help that he was a Russian Caucasian so was also very rare and beautiful.

Steward had suddenly started to rebel in the house, first, when let out on his walk, he bit a girl on the street but he would usually never do that. Couple of days later, he started also growling at the people who take care of him. I didn’t even believe what they were telling me till one evening I went to his cage to give him food and after seeing me, he got so aggressive and wild and started barking.

We let it all slide really, till he bit the person who fed him and my mum decided that it had become beyond her because we have kids running around often in my house and she didn’t want to take the chance of steward pouncing on one of them one day. She decided to let him go because he had become rebellious and untamable. I feel like I’m still mourning him each time I think in that direction.

I was thinking about steward last night and God said something to me, He said ‘rebellion makes you hazardous to your environment‘. I spent some time meditating on it and I realised that while God is not human like my mum who will let us go, He might still need to carry out measures to stop us from being hazardous to the environment that He has placed us in. This measures will look like different things to different people but it is all borne from a place of love, for you and also for the people around you.

While resistance to authority might be a lot more obvious with us on earth, it might not look same with God. With God, our rebellion is not very obvious to others but we and God are aware.

Your refusal to obey God and stay on the course He’s placed you on puts you in a position where you might never reach the people God wants you to reach or minister to the people that He wants you to minister to. I’m reminded of a video I watched once where a multi-millionaire appeared before God so excited and happy because of the millions He had pumped into kingdom work. After he finished bragging about it, God said ‘Son, yes, you did all this but you don’t understand that you would have done x10 more if you had just stayed where I asked you to‘. Wherever that was, only himself and God knew. Immediately, he became sober and remembered how God had spoken to him severally in that aspect and he had ignored to chase ‘his big dream’.

Guess what? He did make it, and He even made it big, but was it the plan and purpose for his life? No.

And I understand that this is so hard to chew because sometimes we get caught in the ‘what does God even want?’ and i’ll tell you. All God wants is you, and He wants you to a point that you want him beyond any other want including money, fame, connections and power.

You will know yourself when you’re at that place of total surrender to the plan and will of God and my prayer is that God takes all of us to that place. It is the place of true rest!