The Disclaimer and Prelude
I have sat down and drafted many a blog
post over the last couple of weeks since I posted the "We're Back" post. Each time attempting to express
my thoughts regarding the last five months. Yet, I never feel quite
satisfied with what I have written. It isn't a
'perfectionist' thing...I am acutely aware of what that looks like.
It is more a failure to truly capture in words my experience.
Perhaps it is because the experience of wrestling with God is still
so fresh or so deeply personal that it makes it nearly impossible at
this point to express it in words; or perhaps it is because I risk
sounding crazy! Maybe it is all of the above.
I'd also like to
propose a disclaimer that for those out there who do not follow
Jesus, it is likely that my experience looks a lot like
self-inflicted misery and insanity. For those who do follow Jesus, it seems that we
each journey with the Lord in a way that is unique to our God-created
personality and character. Either way, my experience is part of my
story.
With that said, I
will end this post with a few excerpts from My
Utmost for His Highest by Oswald
Chambers. Other than the Bible, this little book has been my daily
companion for the last month or so. His words have the ability to
both comfort and infuriate me.
From September 12th: “There are times in your spiritual life when there is confusion, and the way out of it is not simply to say that you should not be confused. It is not a matter of right and wrong, but a matter of God taking you through a way that you temporarily do not understand. And it is only by going through the spiritual confusion that you will come to the understanding of what God wants from you.”
From September 13th: “True surrender is not simply surrender of our external life but of our will—and once that is done, surrender is complete. The greatest crisis we ever face is the surrender of our will. Yet God never forces a person's will into surrender, and He never begs. He patiently waits until that person willingly yields to Him. And once that battle has been fought, it never needs to be fought again.”
From September 28th: “Jesus' primary consideration is my absolute annihilation of my right to myself...” “Very few of us truly know what is meant by the absolute 'go' [Reference to Mark 10:21] of unconditional identification with and abandonment and surrender to Jesus.”
Let me “distill”
this into a few thoughts as my husband would say. The take-home
point for me is this: the need and daily exercise of laying down me
(my wants and desires) and picking up His wants and desires for me. I am an expert at focusing on me; I am a novice and life-long learner of focusing on Christ.
