I was seething on the inside, though I wasn’t quite ready to admit it.
SOMEBODY. JUST. FIX. IT.
When all is still and I am honest with myself. Up above is what my soul is crying out. I just want the situations to stop. I want out of the pressure. I want to understand. And by all of that I just want someone to fix “it”. Whatever “it” might be on a given day or in a given season.
And on this given evening, the Lord was leading me to passages in His Word that relate to current situations, but ones that make no sense to me or that don't seem quite clear. In short, He isn't "fixing" it like I want Him to. Instead, He is giving me wisdom as I have to walk straight through the situations, learning lessons from Him that only He knows the purpose of.
I just want to put this out as a reminder that rarely do people see the honest, seething moments of our sanctification.
We can do a good job at hiding it– even from ourselves.
But the Lord is too sovereign and too faithful to His mission in saving and redeeming a people to leave us the way we are. He will place us in whatever circumstances it takes to mold us to His image... and He will patiently bear with us as long as it takes for us to stop fighting Him in the purification process.
You see, I am a fixer. I like things to be in order and tidy. I hate messy. I hate emotions. I hate the gray. I thrive off of a clean, black and white situation. But do you know what I’m learning in this painful, yet fruitful season?
The world is not black and white.
Sure, there are many truths that are obvious in God’s Word that we can cling to in all situations. There are clear moral commands. I am not talking about those.
I am talking about the day to day situations that we find ourselves in. Hardly any of them are black and white because if they were then we would have all the details and understanding to organize them as such... and we just don’t. Why?
Because we are not God.
Only He holds all the pieces in that way.
And for this 23 year old who easily makes an idol out of control and understanding in order to gain a false sense of security, that is a truth that if I am being utterly transparent is rocking my world. It hurts.
However...
It hurts because it is my natural, fleshly tendency. The sinful tendency to want to be God and rule my own little kingdom in which I have all the answers and everything stays just “so”. And that is a kingdom that must die. I make an awful god.
So it hurts, but it is the type of hurt that will yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness in time (Hebrews 12). And that is why I make a post that is so public… as a reminder that let’s all remember that for any peaceful fruit of righteousness we see in one another, there was most likely an ugly crying, grieving, angry, lamenting, crucifying of self behind closed doors that you did not see… and that is where this false sense of reality in thinking that the Christian life is one of peaceful rainbows and butterflies takes root rather than remembering it is a painful long pilgrim journey…
Yet it is a journey I want to be found trekking along until the bitter end.
No matter the cost. No matter the hardship or pain.
Just whatever it takes to make me look more like Jesus and hear the words “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
Hebrews 12:7-11
7 It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Furthermore, we had [e]earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of [f]spirits, and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. 11 All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
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