I cannot believe that it’s actually been 4 months now… since we left for the Bahamas… wow. I’ve been wanting to keep up with all the thought processes and changes in my thinking since I’ve gotten home; especially since God has been speaking such an incredible number of things to me, with incredible depth… but that’s the problem. It’s been so much in so little amount of time that it’s been impossible to keep up with all of it. I mean I have to process it all for myself first, let alone discuss my thoughts on a blog… but here I am, and now I’m going to try and start sharing some of my thought processes; just to fill you in on the happenings of my heart and life. I mean it’s not all of it, that’s for sure… even just the number and the depth of the S.O.A.P.s that I’ve been doing have been truly intense… but also incredible. If only I could cover all the broken mindsets and the perspective changes, everything that God’s taught me and is continuing to teach me. What’s cool is that what I said in my December 9 post was entirely true… which I just read over... The changes God made in me on the trip were so much more than just a high. Being away from everything familiar to me, everything I knew, every way of thinking, every perspective (even of myself), in that environment and for that amount of time… well it did some life altering changes in me. It’s made a lot of the things that I’ve learned and known for years, a part of who I am, through my experiences. All of a sudden I find myself living and breathing God, constantly, all the time. I find the ideals have established themselves as a part of my very being.
I’ve been trying to keep up all of this the best I can even just for myself in my journals… even through that… I could write books worth and still not cover everything that I’ve learned and gone through. It’s extensive; the true challenge being however… relaying these thoughts now, to the world.
An interesting effect of the trip on me and my thinking was how easily I was made to forget things due to the issues I was facing (this is while I was still on the trip). I started to forget a lot of things God’s done and established in me, I even forgot the excitement of God restoring my confidence just before the trip. It’s funny how easy it is to forget those things when you get caught up in a situation and you lose your focus, allowing your own emotions, goals, and desires to twist your point of view. Perspective, I’ve realized, is everything. You focus on the wrong thing, that’s then, all you can see, causing you to forget everything else, even if it’s more important to remember.
It wasn’t the forgetting that was great, but the now remembering. Now having gone through hell and fire, gone through battle and conflict, confusion and chaos in my own life and heart… having my perspective once again cleared and eyes drawn once more to where they should be, on the cross, on Christ and the promise of His eternal love… realizing once again just the irrelevance of my problems in comparison with who He is and the things He’s done for me. The best part about going through something like that… is just like when Satan stole my confidence from me and God restored it… God is not a God who just restores things, but also makes them entirely new! So, coming out of the things my heart was dealing with from the circumstances that I was facing, I was not just being brought out of it and back into who I was before… but being brought out into an entirely new skin, into an even stronger identity than before. An identity who has now learned things, having allowed myself to have a teachable spirit which then allowed God mold and teach me the things He wanted to. It also gave me new testimony of who God is despite my failings and my situation. Especially after having faced a situation where I was given the opportunity to put God in place of my hurt and weariness, allowing Him to be my strength in my weakness no matter how hard that might’ve been to do. Which, let me just say, is extremely hard to do; particularly when your focus is off and your concerns are blinded by your own will; along with your own perspective and your own idea of how to solve the problem.
An additional effect of my experiences, just as I mentioned in my December 9 post… having come home after going through some of the things I went through had a very sobering effect on me. I wasn’t just a fanatical crazy with all these new ideals burning in me just because of some amazing trip; I wasn’t coming off of a high. On the contrary… when I came home it was as if I had just run a marathon. I was exhausted, at first I wanted to escape from everything… I wanted to bury myself in everything but myself so that I wouldn’t have to think about any of it. I sought solace in anything and everything, I wanted to even get away literally, move somewhere... leave, distance myself from the problem. Not all of it was entirely intended for escape, my general nature is to dive into ministry and use every experience God’s given me for His glory in other people’s lives. The thing that I forgot was that God’s name needs to be made known fully in my own life before He can be made known in the lives of others through me. Soon though, I realized that there were things going on inside of me and things that I needed to learn that required time, reflection and a lot of allowing God to shape me. It brought me to a point where I realized that I wanted nothing to do with ministry; not for myself, but after a conversation with an old teacher I was caught and reminded that I wasn’t in any position to be doing stuff for other people if I wasn’t ok anyway.
There were things that God needed to do in me before He could use me. One thing I had to come to terms with was that that was ok. Usually, I absolutely hate being the one that needs help, I hate facing myself and the fact that I too go through things and forget things just as much as other people do. I too, have to be told the very things I often tell other people in their time of need; and that’s ok. God’s name has to be made known in our own lives through our struggles and humility just as much as in the lives of other people through us. Our focus is not being used by Him for ourselves but being used by Him for His purposes, full surrender means letting Him work in us as well as through us. Being human, each of us are going to fail; there were endless conversations I had with pastor Jimmy in the Bahamas about that very fact: that as humans, everything we do will have some kind of selfish motive behind it, always; and oh how I can’t wait till I get to heaven and I can finally worship God in the fullness of who I was made to be, in the fullness of the freedom I was intended to have while worshipping him; free of selfishness, free of any self-seeking motivation.
Involving other people and asking them for help and having to have the very people I’ve poured into in the past have to pour into me may have been uncomfortable and humbling; still, I learn quickly and it was awesome also, to let God show me how he puts us in each others lives at just the right times for just the right reasons… this is what it means to be a family of God; and it’s in us admitting our weaknesses that God can come in and make us stronger.
The things that God was doing and changing in me on the trip had continued into my daily life once I got home… and there were many times where I just got to a point of overload. I didn’t want to face it anymore; but something really cool about going through all of this is that a few years ago God put it on my heart to pray that He would shake the foundations of my faith. My goal (as He put it in my heart), was that the only thing left standing would be what should be standing (which is Christ), just as His word says. I knew that it was a dangerous prayer to pray, but I never realized just HOW dangerous. I am apparently facing the aftermath of that prayer even now, Praise God! After I prayed that prayer, the hell that I faced was incredible. All of a sudden, everything around me was falling apart, my friends, my family, school, even my position as a middle school leader. I started to go through some of the most painful experiences of my life. Another sort of conjoining prayer to that was that God would shape my identity to His 100%... another dangerous prayer to pray, especially going hand in hand with the former. Yet, again, by the end, the only thing left standing is Christ. How true has that become in my life. No matter what I go through, no matter how painful, and no matter how confusing; God is always, always, always the only thing that I have to hold onto. He’s taken individual parts of my life and one at a time torn down every part of me that builds my identity on things that I shouldn’t; He then proceeds to establish Himself as my identity in its place. This process takes a lot of painful work, but once completed, just as His word says, it’s that we might not be lacking in anything. We also need to remember that God is not a God who leaves us on our own through these times, but He gives us the strength we need for every day that we take on. All of this, difficult as most of it has been, has been an answer to prayer. It’s God’s refining fire in my life and I know that the outcome will outweigh the difficulty of the process.
I’m so excited to be a part of something that is just so much bigger than myself, so much bigger than my own problems. I’m so glad to be serving a God who knows what He’s doing, always. He knows the desires of my heart and He knows the plans He has for my life. My only concern is: will I choose to trust the creator of the universe who only has the best in store for me; or will I worry and fuss because from my point of view, nothing is working the way it should? I can only see a part of the masterpiece, He’s the artist with the end in mind… the funny blend of colors in the corner of the canvas might concern me, but all He can see is the depth and beauty of the rose that those red’s and greens will bring. I am privileged and chosen… He’s made me a very specific way same as any of you, to use me for His specific purposes. My only goal is to line up with Him… loving and serving Him with everything that I have, being used entirely and to the fullest extent for the very reason I was initially made.
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