I’ve got a new pass-time. I call it throwing spanners. 

To ‘throw a spanner in the works’ means ‘to do something that prevents a plan or activity from succeeding’, which doesn’t sound a very nice thing to do, granted. What I mean however, is that I want to be more bold at asking questions that cause us to stop for a moment, and reassess whether the plan we are speeding ahead with is where we want to be going, where we are called to go. I want you to start throwing spanners too.

‘Many are the plans in a human heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.’ Proverbs 19: 21.

I want us to throw spanners into assumptions, low expectations, plans made without our maker having a say. I want us to ask questions that challenge, that halt the machine of our routine for a moment and cause us to think and perhaps change course. Questions like: “what if I didn’t live with all Christians next year but stayed with my housemates yet to meet Jesus?” or “what if money was taken out of the equation when it comes to how I spend my summer?” or “what if I didn’t go home after graduating? What If I stayed in my uni church community and what if we considered church planting instead, to carry on reaching the campus and city?”

Students of the UK, this is your heads-up; I’m throwing spanners, and I want you to throw some too. Genuinely, why not ask those kind of questions to our mates who don’t follow Jesus as well? “What is your measure of success and when will you have ‘enough’ in your life?”, “If your parent’s expectation didn’t exist, and grad schemes weren’t the be-all and end-all, what would your dream job/ life plan look like?”

Let this be the year of throwing spanners into our plans, in order to fix our eyes on Jesus and see God’s purposes above anything. It is no small thing to be a student following Jesus in the UK today. I do not underestimate you, God certainly doesn’t under estimate his power in you. Be bold, go for it, throw spanners.