“you can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” CS Lewis.
I have spent the past three years living somewhat in the “desert.” I have been spiritually dry, physically complacent and on a rollercoaster of feelings. But I was able to hide it well, or at least was able to package it in a bow. A miscarriage, the loss of a dear friend, a marriage that was imploding and some deep wounding from within my home and others; I began to weave a web of deception within my friends and myself. I couldn’t articulate the hurt and quite honestly, didn’t want to face it. I wanted to blink and be “ok.” So I dismissed it all.
I wanted to be healed already. I wanted the already done story. But as I learned this weekend, “To say that we’ve been healed is say that we are broken.” And friends, I’ve been pretty broken.
I didn’t want to admit it because I wanted to control it. I wanted to numb it. But the more I tried to control the facade, the more I felt the Lord pinning me down. The more he pinned me down, the more I kicked and screamed. I was becoming a version of myself that I hated. I wasn’t OK and I have no idea why it took me so long to admit it. I was surviving; barely.
It wasn’t until this time, last year, that I began to drop this fight of control I had going with the Lord. And OH BOY, did I feel the weight of his pressure. Little did I know that he was simply trying to remove my chains that had so tightly gripped my heart. It felt like Jacob wrestling God in Genesis 32.
“Then man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”
Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name? Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying “It is because I saw God face to face and yet my life was spared.”
The past year has been spent, what has felt like, standing face to face with God with the threat of wondering if God was good or if he could be trusted. Are you hurting me or healing me?
And the outcome? Extreme pain and extreme trust. He stuck his finger directly on a wound that I didn’t know was killing me and pressed in hard. In that pain, I saw the Lord was not hurting me, but finding the source and healing me.
“The weight of God is just as much crushing as it is resuscitating .” - Mo Isom
It was here that I knew with absolute certainty, that God is good and he can be trusted. With a gigantic physical blow in my life that uprooted friends, church and my marriage, came a gasping breath of life.
I’m a pretty crappy god of my own life, it turns out. My control only leads me to picking up pieces of paper in a tornado storm. I have had to repent and go back where my wounding bled out to others and I have had to forgive when the wounding of others has been left unresolved.
But you know what is resolved? My Jesus and his hand over my life. As I walk out of this season, with a limp, the thing to remember is that I am still walking. I am still here and the Lord is still working in me.
I can’t change everything that has happened. And dear one, you can’t either. But the ending? That is a different story. And that story begins with honesty, vulnerability and a GOOD God who will fight for you. Even if He has to fight YOU to FREE you.
Your story is not done yet and neither is mine.