I am struggling today, and it feels like I've been struggling this entire week, but I haven't been. Struggling today feels like more than it really is. Today I struggled at some point during the day, more than usual, because now as I lay down to go to sleep I have a sense of unrest and lack of peace. I usually feel grateful and relaxed when I have been walking forth in obedience throughout the day, but right now I can't find my peace. I want to remember this moment as a way of evidence for what disobedience and sin often and inevitably leads to. A lack of peace is most felt, but there is also a dreadful hopelessness, I hear my thoughts putting my past joys down as fleeting and increasing my doubts of who God is and whether or not He is real, or the legitimacy of who I am in Him is weakened. I know these are lies, but the feeling that they are true is so powerfully felt. I know they are lies because God says His love for me does not change, even when He is angry with me for my disobedience. His anger is like that of a father who had to watch his kid touch a burning stove top despite his firm warning to stay away, the father is angry because his child's disobedience led to harm that could have landed him in serious danger. God has only good intentions for me, but my faith still falters at the sight of a terrible storm! I begin to think I must take control in order to preserve myself, but all the while God keeps saying...I'm God, don't fear what you see but fear what you know.
(The next day)
So today I decided to just stare at Him, rather than go with the currents of my emotions or what I felt like would be best, I'm just sitting here staring at Him, and His peace rests on me like an oasis in the desert. Joy is raining like a feathery drizzle, and I'm just so reminded that He is God and I am not. He will have all the glory regardless of my responses, and I will only benefit to obey Him, and vice versa, that any disobedience will only lead to my own demise. Sigh. My foolish heart is so grateful to be in the hands of a patient Father right now.
I want to see God do crazy miraculous spectacular things in my life. I want to see things in my life that are damaged be fixed, to see things in my life that are bad become good, the weaknesses be strengths. But I can't see any of that if I stand in God's way with my desire to control my life as I see fit. It's like asking a plumber to fix a leaking pipe. We have our hand over the area of damage, and we know, we so for sure know without a doubt that if we take our hand off the area that the area will be exposed and maybe even start to leak out! So we keep our hand over the damage, and we wonder if this plumber will really be able to fix the damage, but first we have to remove our hand for him to even be able to begin the process of fixing. That's how I see myself before God as I pray for all the broken areas of my life. I have my hand as a very poor and even difficult/tiring temporary fixture over my problems, and God is saying "Now let go so I can get to work on that", but I'm so scared that if I let go the damage will be more than I can bear. What if poop starts coming out of the pipe?! Or dead cockroaches?! What if I let go and the entire thing just collapses and ends up being more broken than before?! Then it would have been better to have kept my hand there, I start to think. So maybe I should just hold my hand of temporary and tiring control over this leak...but for how long? Do I not believe God is God? That He can fix it even if the entire thing collapses? The God I have come to know through the bible would not abandon me, but He promises to heal and make all things new. The God I know is someone who loves me so fiercely that to even question Him on this now feels foolish. So I lift my hand as I tremble and cry from the loss of my temporary control, and cry even more as I see the mess spill out, the damage is more than I even thought! But I let go, and He can now begin to fix it, but as He does I think He let's the mess get a lot more messier intentionally (because He cares more about our relationship of trust being built than this one problem getting fixed) in order to show me just how powerful he really is so that the next time I have a burst pipe or a hurricane comes and tears down my entire house, I'll remember that He is bigger and more powerful. The bigger the mess the bigger my faith in Him becomes when I let my hand go, because if He can be trusted with such a giant mess, then I can grow in the confidence that He can be trusted with everything. However, that still doesn't make seeing the mess (especially when the mess gets even more disgusting and terrible) easy...it's still the visible things that are more easily felt than the knowledge of what is yet to be seen. So I am in a sea of my emotions that shout: "this looks bad! Put your hand back! Look it's getting worse! Hurry up before it's too late! Stop this mess! Look at it! You're going to regret this!" And man this is when the crying gets so out of control because I have to fight everything in me that tells me not to trust God because of what I see (the mess getting worse!). But I hold on to truth rather than what I see, because I made the choice to believe that God is real. If God is real then He is good because He made a way for us to be with Him by giving us His only Son to die as the ultimate sacrifice that would pay for everyone's debt. If He is real then He loves me because He has yet to fail me in my meager as well as monumental moments of relentless trust in Him.
As time goes by, I see more and more that I never want to go back to being the one whose hand is over anything. I am such a terrible fixer. Haha.
J
Ps: I'm writing this from my room, my bedroom (I sleep on the bottom bunk with 6 other roommates), and I look behind me and there's a baby bird that looks like a vulture, bald and kind of handicapped with tufts of hair in odd places, calling out to its mother from the floor of my bedroom! How it got there I have no clue. It's the size of a deformed ping pong ball. But when and how did it get to be behind my chair on the ground is concerning me. Naturally I checked my hair in case it had a sibling that fell too, but nope...just one random bird. In my bedroom. It must have come in through the vent? Because there is no other opening....haha just so bizarre. But this little bald creature is me, I am completely helpless on the floor haha, so vulnerable and bald. But His hands carry me safely to where I need to be.
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