First off, I want to celebrate that I have lost 6 pounds! It's slow progress but, it's progress nonetheless. I am setting my alarm earlier and earlier and am attempting to get to bed at a reasonable hour. As I am adding new activities to my morning routine, I am still struggling to manage my time better. Last week was a week of running late no matter what I did. I am trying this week to be more mindful of my time and to stop assuming everything will take longer than I think as I plan for things to go wrong and leave myself time for that. Maybe it's a little pathetic that I'm still learning this. You would think with how much I hate being late, that I would work hard to avoid that possibility. Maybe someday...but, then...
"The more you talk about what is right, even talk about doing it, the more danger you are in of turning it into unpracticed theory. Talk without actions saps the very will...We do not understand the next page of God's lesson book: we see only the one before us...when we understand the one before us, only then are we able to turn to the next...the poorest desire to draw near him is an approach to him."- George MacDonald.
My times with God every morning has brought me a mixture of joy and pain. So much of my heart
has been exposed under God's light during these intimate moments: I am becoming well aware of my
imperfections and areas of sin in my life. It's been challenging
and I really hope others can see results as I continue to surrender to Him. At first, I was limiting myself to Monday through Friday, giving myself Saturdays off and deciding corporate worship on Sundays was good enough. After four weeks, I developed an intense hunger for more time with God, so am now daily starting every day with Jesus. I have been spending time in prayer, reading "Knowing
the Heart of God" by George MacDonald (a section of which I quoted above), reading through Psalms and Isaiah and a lot of the Epistles. Consequently, I have been called out on my
pride, disobedience,
possessions holding me, and the reasons why I have doubted and
not trusted God. But, there has also been some encouragement as I finally see lessons that He has been trying to teach me over the past ten years or so. I actually thanked God this morning that He has been convicting me so
strongly: it's been so long since I have allowed myself to feel His
corrections and prompting.
I do not say these things to boast, or be like, "Oh, look at me I'm holy!" I say these things to be like... "Wow! God is meeting me right where I am, speaking to be so intimately and personally, I was such an idiot to have run from these moments for the past ten years."
The scariest knowledge of all is... I knew time with God would be this sweet. I knew how it felt to pursue the presence of God: I had done it before since I was a child up until I was about twenty years old. Oh, but then, I stumbled: then I wallowed in my sin, convincing myself that I could possibly find happiness apart from God. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. One of the darkest lies I believed was that by basking in God's presence I would lose touch with reality and could never relate to people in, you know, the "real" world. Oh the travesty. In my deluded mind, I saw only three options to being a Christian: extreme fanaticism, apathy, or atheism.
I knew entirely too much of God to be an atheist. I had been a "victim" of the extreme fanaticism: I lived with ans witness daily the ill effects of others becoming obsessed with what they believed about God and being bound by the letter of the Law (doing everything exactly right) and not the heart of the Law and knowing and becoming like Christ Himself (which is in fact what Christian means: little Christ). In light of these decisions, wallowing in self pity and laziness, I settled for mediocre apathy. Being passionate follower of Jesus takes hard work. And I was tired. Tired of pretending I was ok, not depressed and suicidal. I pushed away the very people and One Who loved me most. If I didn't do too much, still attempted to do and say Christian-ish things then God wouldn't abandon me, I could be a good person, and be happy, right?
Wrong.
I have been bouncing between desperation, numbness and misery for the past ten years: ok, more like for six years. Because four years ago, February 17, 2009, (I cannot believe it has already been four years!) I was radically delivered *another story for another time* and pledged my entire being to Jesus once more. So, these past four years have been a journey of constant surrender, fighting myself, fighting God and destroying my self-image, pride, hatred and fears. Also, let us not forget the joys, breakthroughs, and awesome stuff you know, like meeting and marrying my awesome hubby.
Anyway! Through all this rambling, I hope sharing some snippets of my journey is helping someone besides myself. I am just excited to find myself "back where I began" and yet a thousand miles away from where I fell. I had despaired that I hadn't made any progress on my way through the long wilderness: But, Jesus keeps showing me how far I have come.
With that, I will leave you all with this reminder to myself:
"Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brother and Sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have take hold of it. But on this I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Philippians 3:12-14
