Sometimes waiting on God is the loneliest place man can venture. It is still. It is quiet. You strain to hear His voice, to have Him step down from His heavenly throne to visit you for a while. You long for Him to make sense of all the random pieces of your life, for Him to show you why it was a good thing that your heart was broken way back when… You remember the words He spoke to you long ago, when you were just a baby in Him. You remember how it felt when everything was fresh and new. You remember how you saw with such clear eyes and how you had such an eager heart to do the will of the Father. Then the years pass and pass and pass and you’re tempted to forget the things He had spoken to you when you were young. The years, the time, threaten to kill your hopes and your dreams. They threaten to steal your seed of hope, your seed of faith. The trials will either kill your faith or make it stronger. Which will it be?
You enter a place in your faith where you cannot go back to what you used to be. You cannot claim the ignorance you once had, though your ignorance was at times, bliss. You enter a place of such loneliness and not a single, living human being can understand the depth of your longing and loneliness. Even you don’t understand you. Only the prophets of old and the living God can understand you. You just know that you are still not satisfied. The sobering reality is you shall never be satisfied in this life. There will be moments, seasons, periods of time that you feel all of heaven surrounding you and for that brief and passing moment, you are satisfied. But those moments do not last long. They are fleeting and you are left, once again, hungering and thirsting for the Bread of Life and the Water of the Spirit.
Oftentimes, looking back to your past is death. God implicitly instructed Lot and his wife not to look back, but she did anyways and in that very moment, she died. She died because she stopped looking ahead. She died because she gave into the temptation to look at what she left behind her, to revisit the pain of the past. And in one, brief second, it consumed her. It overtook and killed her.
In our times of waiting, in our times of loneliness and quiet, we are often tempted to look back. Don’t. Don’t look back. Fight and fight hard to look ahead, to keep hope alive.
Be still my soul and wait upon the Lord.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Friday, June 8, 2007
Birth
Isaiah 66:9
“Do I bring to the moment of birth and not give delivery?" says the Lord. "Do I close up the womb when I bring to delivery?" says your God.
June has come and once again, I have given a spiritual birth to something that I labored for through the winter and spring. I was praying on the long ride home from Minnesota on on New Year’s Day. I felt like God said to me, “By June, you’ll have a new job.”
This made me immensely glad. Yet, I didn’t get too excited because after all, there have been countless moments where I thought I heard the voice of God but was mistaken. So I held lightly to that word and hoped it was true. At the time, I was in a job that was sucking the lifeblood out of my every breathing moment. It was the most intense, most horrific work experience I had ever encountered. It was often a daily battle for me to understand why a loving, gracious God would put me in such an inferno. I guess Daniel and the boys thought the same thing when old Nebbie threw them in the furnace.
But they weren't there for long and neither was I.
On May 11th, I got an offer for the job of my dreams: a creative writer position with a cutting edge communications company in Colorado. The salary was a 40% increase from my current salary, and I would be working from home. Because the company puts a high value on creativity, they encourage key employees to live anywhere in the continental U.S. and simply communicate by phone and computer—both of which they would provide.
I was absolutely stunned. Speechless. For those of you who know me, running out of words is a rarity for me. The Lord my God had come through in the most unimaginably wonderful way…it was absolutely one of the most amazing opportunities that He has ever brought to me. Furthermore, I was later told that I was 1 of 80 candidates for the position. God reserved a place just for me.
I didn’t even know this kind of a job existed. When I was job searching, I was discouraged because I absolutely hated the pressure and work load of my present field and didn’t have experience in anything else. I was in a small, tight place and I couldn’t see a way out. I was desperate for God to help me break out of this place. And He did. On a whim one day, I applied on Monster.com for this position. The job description was vague and the company’s website was under construction. I brushed it off and didn’t give it another moment’s thought. Until one day a few weeks later, I was contacted for a phone interview. From there, things moved exceptionally quickly and I was offered the position immediately.
I purposely wrote the previous entry in April so that I could bring all of you with me on this journey. I brought you with me so that your faith could be strengthened. It’s not to show you how “great” I am, but how great HE is. Look and see what the Lord has done. What He has done for me, surely He will do for you.
“Do I bring to the moment of birth and not give delivery?" says the Lord. "Do I close up the womb when I bring to delivery?" says your God.
June has come and once again, I have given a spiritual birth to something that I labored for through the winter and spring. I was praying on the long ride home from Minnesota on on New Year’s Day. I felt like God said to me, “By June, you’ll have a new job.”
This made me immensely glad. Yet, I didn’t get too excited because after all, there have been countless moments where I thought I heard the voice of God but was mistaken. So I held lightly to that word and hoped it was true. At the time, I was in a job that was sucking the lifeblood out of my every breathing moment. It was the most intense, most horrific work experience I had ever encountered. It was often a daily battle for me to understand why a loving, gracious God would put me in such an inferno. I guess Daniel and the boys thought the same thing when old Nebbie threw them in the furnace.
But they weren't there for long and neither was I.
On May 11th, I got an offer for the job of my dreams: a creative writer position with a cutting edge communications company in Colorado. The salary was a 40% increase from my current salary, and I would be working from home. Because the company puts a high value on creativity, they encourage key employees to live anywhere in the continental U.S. and simply communicate by phone and computer—both of which they would provide.
I was absolutely stunned. Speechless. For those of you who know me, running out of words is a rarity for me. The Lord my God had come through in the most unimaginably wonderful way…it was absolutely one of the most amazing opportunities that He has ever brought to me. Furthermore, I was later told that I was 1 of 80 candidates for the position. God reserved a place just for me.
I didn’t even know this kind of a job existed. When I was job searching, I was discouraged because I absolutely hated the pressure and work load of my present field and didn’t have experience in anything else. I was in a small, tight place and I couldn’t see a way out. I was desperate for God to help me break out of this place. And He did. On a whim one day, I applied on Monster.com for this position. The job description was vague and the company’s website was under construction. I brushed it off and didn’t give it another moment’s thought. Until one day a few weeks later, I was contacted for a phone interview. From there, things moved exceptionally quickly and I was offered the position immediately.
I purposely wrote the previous entry in April so that I could bring all of you with me on this journey. I brought you with me so that your faith could be strengthened. It’s not to show you how “great” I am, but how great HE is. Look and see what the Lord has done. What He has done for me, surely He will do for you.
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