Do you ever feel when reading, be it scripture or some sort of book, that the Lord is just sitting right there on the tip of your brain? This great epiphany or understanding is just.right.there. but you can’t seem to reach it? This is where I am. I feel like I’m in this raging battle between the Lord really teaching me this great lesson and my sinfulness pushing Him out of the way. The distractions of my mind whirling so much that I can’t focus enough to get it.
I’m reading Soul Talk by Larry Crabb with a group of women. It’s been a very, very different sort of book for me and honestly at first was difficult to understand. What he writes about is so counter to the way we naturally relate, even when we’ve been Believers for a long time, that I have to stop every few paragraphs and get my bearings.
By far the most awakening chapter for me has been on thinking vision and moving toward brokenness. Crabb writes:
As long as we aim toward a vision we think we can reach, God lets us try. And sometimes we do pull it off…we feel proud and call it gratitude. If it doesn’t, we feel defeated and wonder why God didn’t bless us. But when we aim so high we are forced to face how inadequate our adequacies are, we realize our need for spiritual power.
But what He also writes about in the book is that as Believers, we get so caught up in the thought that if we are doing what God has declared He will always bless us. But the problem is we think materially or in ease of life. And that’s not true. That’s what’s been so hard for me to think about. He will by all means provide for me. He will supply my needs. He has promised that. And He has promised His love for me…an amazing and passionate love.
That is the blessing. The greater reward is obviously beyond this Earth.
I get so caught up in thinking that when my life is hard. When I am struggling to make ends meet that He is going to automatically fill up my bank account and “bless” me.
But really, the blessing is that I wake up every morning, loved no less by my Creator and promised to be given manna every day. As Crabb says: As long as my vision is within my reach, I am merely using God – not abandoning myself to Him. My blessings come from pure and utter abandonment to Him.
The question to ask myself is where I am quenching the Spirit. What are the many areas of my life that I am trying to make work without desperate dependence on Him? That is a crazy scary question. It addresses areas of control and areas of brokenness that I don’t want to enter. It brings me to a place where I have to admit my weakness and my fear and give them over to Him. But His power doesn’t fully come forward in us as long as there is so much us in us.
Children of God – and everyone else – think nobody loves them enough for them to let go of control. Gently the Spirit detaches us from everything we’ve turned to for life and invites us to admit how weary and pressured we feel…then we move from brokenness to power; feeling ourselves being centered in Christ, no longer in ourselves.
And therein lies my greatest struggle. I don’t believe that God loves me enough. I don’t believe that He is going to be there when I jump. It’s like my little girl jumping into the pool. She can either fully trust that her daddy is going to catch her and stand up on the side and jump in with full abandonment and trust. Or she can bend her knees, squat down, hang on to the side and just sort of fall into His arms because she is scared he isn’t going to be there.
I want to jump off the highest dive, with full abandonment into His loving arms.
It is only then that His Spirit can move in me in such a way that I can tell my story and truly be with others in their mess.
It’s Friday.
This space has been pretty silent for a while, the words have been floating more through my head and less out into this little corner.
Today I have the opportunity to speak with others, for five minutes,
without editing,
without worries
on one word given by the gypsy mama.
Today’s word is: opportunity
GO:
I believe the Lord weaves a theme of words, stories, people, sermons, paragraphs throughout our lives.
This theme changes; it ebbs and flows and moves throughout all the different times and seasons as we wake day after day. Each day bringing another opportunity for the Lord to speak.
The theme in my life lately has been JOY in the midst of suffering…in the midst of brokenness…in the midst of sorrow. It’s a scary and troublesome thing to my sinful heart to read and hear over and again about brokenness. To read about sorrow and then realize that the Lord is preparing my heart for something. He is opening me up to the opportunity for Him to show Himself. An opportunity to see Him, to see nothing but Him,
but with the knowledge that seeing Him might come with pain.
I have the opportunity to hide, to be fearful, to grasp onto the anxiety of what this recurring theme might mean. To imagine all the what ifs?
Or I can use this opportunity to cling more to Him.
To be closer to Him
and to rest.
STOP
On Fridays I take 5 minutes to just write.
No worries.
No edits.
One word.
Join me!
Today’s word is: IDENTITY
GO
I totally had to laugh when I saw today’s word. Identity.
If there was one word that the Lord has worked with on me for the past 5 years it has been identity.
He has stripped, layer by layer, away at what I thought was my identity and continues to peel away more and more.
Sometimes this stripping of layers has been freeing and wonderful, kind of like when you are peeling from a sunburn and you just.can’t.stop.peeling even though it’s kind of gross what you are doing when you think about it.
Other times this peeling away hurts. It is deep, like a burn. Where the layers of skin have been hurt and damaged and new skin has to grow there. That is what He does. He takes away those layers that shouldn’t be there, those parts of my identity that are false and He grows a new one.
He layers Himself into me. That as less and less of myself and who I thought I was and needed to be are stripped away, I am left with His layers.
STOP
Today is Friday.
I join with many others, writing without worry.
Writing for fun.
Writing just for me and no one else the first thing that comes to mind when I see the word…
“REAL“
START
I wrote this week about how the Lord has revealed to me my story. My story parallels that of the Isrealites who were on this cycle of believing, complaining & wrestling, not believing and then back to believing again. Essentially they were struggling with the idea of REAL. Was God real? Is God real?
Was the light & fire really being provided by God? This person that Moses had seen and sat and talked with?
How could they know except to see the glow on the face of Moses when he came down from meeting with God?
They just had to believe and trust and have faith that the One that was providing for every.basic.need they had was true.
The same goes for me.
I have to believe in God. I have to believe that He is real and He will do what He says He will do.
But, like Moses and Joshua waiting for the Presence to be revealed, I might have to wait six days.
I might just have to sit and know that He is there, He is moving, He is acting in His time.
and know that He is real.
STOP
The Bible is an amazingly alive and rich book. It contains words and stories that speak to us so differently throughout the seasons of our lives. There are verses that I read at 15 and then 21 and now at 37 that mean such different things to me at all these different stages…and yet they are the same words spoken by the same God so many years ago.
That said, I do feel strongly that there are books or passages that truly mirror our lives. Stories that weave into our story and make telling our stories to other so unique and different. For some it is recognizing the Fall of Eve, for others it is the doubting of Thomas or the denial of Peter. Some might identify most with the closeness of John to Jesus; the lying of his head against His chest and just being there. Through a conversation with a friend today, I was awakened to the reality of how God uses these stories when we choose to finally see and hear them. As we build relationships with people, our stories and the ways the Lord has spoken to us, are the things that link those relationships. Not a curriculum, not a tract, not a systematic way of building a disciple. But living our stories out with them.
Yesterday the refrain in my house was “does that behavior ever get you what you want?” and after at least the fifth time it hit me. Just as I continue to say the same phrase to my children and as they continue to repeat the same behavior…the Lord does the same to me. I continue to lack trust in Him, lack faith in Him, question the path He has me on. He continues to provide.
So my story is one like the Israelites. I’m walking through the wilderness with food dropped in my lap, a cloud and pillar directing my steps, yet I keep looking back and complaining. The wilderness is hard; but the past was so much harder. Where He is leading me to is so amazing and unbelievable that in the midst of my wandering, despite all the good in my lap, I keep wondering if it’s real. If He is real.
He calls me to things like Moses that I’m no capable of. Things that I just plain don’t know or understand how to do or respond. Yet, unlike Moses, I tend not to act. I just stay in that cycle of wandering and doubting.
Hopefully at some point my children will get the point that if they continue their behavior it’s truly not going to get them what they want. And hopefully I will to.
I read this quote today and it pretty much sums up what I’ve been writing or trying to write for the past while.
Basically believing that God does hear our prayers AND will answer them…most of the time beyond what we had even imagined.
It is not enough to begin to pray, nor to pray aright;
nor is it enough to continue for a time to pray;
but we must patiently, believingly continue in prayer unto the end,
but we also have to believe that God does hear us and will answer our prayers.
Most frequently we fail in not continuing in prayer until the blessing is obtained,
and in not expecting the blessing.
~ George Muller
It’s Friday.
Time to write for five minutes;
one word
no edits
no worries.
Join in!
Today’s word is {community}
START
Community is hard.
It’s something we all need, yet struggle so deeply to find and maintain.
It’s looking that person in the eye who is walking down your sidewalk.
It’s saying hello to the person on the elevator.
It’s actually talking to the person sitting next to you at church.
It’s being ok with who you are.
We are 18 months into our new community. We’ve left our former church in order to find one within the town we moved to. We’ve changed schools.
We’ve changed so much and we are longing to become deeper involved in our community.
But it’s hard. Why is it so hard to talk to my neighbor and actually get to know her?
Why is it so hard to involve myself in a new place of worship?
Because true community comes from letting ourselves go and becoming involved in something bigger than us.
It’s getting in the dirty of others lives and washing their feet with our hair.
It’s loving like Jesus.
With abandon.
STOP
