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August 17 - October 16, 2024
And I can veto all circumstances that don’t look right, feel right, or smell right. My lungs inhale fresh gusts of predictability and the wind is always a gentle breeze. Never unstable or stormy and certainly not brutal or destructive.
Humans are very attached to outcomes. We say we trust God but behind the scenes we work our fingers to the bone and our emotions into a tangled fray trying to control our outcomes. We praise God when our normal looks like what we thought it would. We question God when it doesn’t. And walk away from Him when we have a sinking suspicion that God is the one who set fire to the hope that was holding us together.
We cannot control our outcomes. We cannot formulate how the promises of God will actually take shape. And we will never be able to demand any of the healing from all the hurt to hurry up.
Though we can’t predict or control or demand the outcome of our circumstances, we can know with great certainty we will be okay. Better than okay. Better than normal. We will be victorious because Jesus is victorious (1 Corinthians 15:57). And victorious people were never meant to settle for normal.
Sometimes to get your life back, you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like.
The disappointment that is exhausting and frustrating you? It holds the potential for so much good. But we’ll only see it as good if we trust the heart of the Giver.
But disappointment isn’t proof that God is withholding good things from us. Sometimes it’s His way of leading us Home.
And I do believe we need to be grateful and positive and let our faith boss our feelings around. But I also think there’s a dangerous aspect to staying quiet and pretending we don’t get exhausted by our disappointments. In the quiet, unexpressed, unwrestled-through disappointments, Satan is handcrafting his most damning weapons against us and those we love. It’s his subtle seduction to get us alone with our thoughts so he can slip in whispers that will develop our disappointments into destructive choices.
If the enemy can isolate us, he can influence us. And his favorite entry point of all is through our disappointments. The enemy comes in as a whisper, lingers like a gentle breeze, and builds like a storm you don’t even see coming. But eventually his insatiable appetite to destroy will unleash the tornado of destruction he planned all along. He doesn’t whisper to our disappointed places to coddle us. He wants to crush us.
If we don’t open up a way to process our disappointments, we’ll be tempted to let Satan rewrite God’s love story as a negative narrative, leaving us more than slightly suspicious of our Creator.
Remember, this is a love story. And we will never appreciate or even desire the hope of our True Love if lesser loves don’t disappoint. The piercing angst of disappointment in everything on this side of eternity creates a discontent with this world and pushes us to long for God Himself—and for the place where we will finally walk in the garden with Him again. Where we will finally have peace and security and eyes that no longer leak tears . . . and hearts that are no longer broken.
all those harsh realities aren’t the end, but rather a temporary middle space. Not the place where we are meant to wallow and dwell. Rather the place through which we will have to learn to wrestle well. I need this wrestling.
My feelings and my faith will almost certainly come into conflict with each other. My feelings see rotten situations as absolutely unnecessary hurt that stinks. My soul sees it as fertilizer for a better future. Both these perspectives are real. And they yank me in different directions with never-ending wrestling. To wrestle well means acknowledging my feelings but moving forward, letting my faith lead the way.
In this restored garden of Eden the curse will be lifted and perfection will greet us like a long-lost friend. There will be no gap between our expectations and experiences. They will be one and the same. We won’t be hurt. We won’t live hurt. We won’t be disappointed, and we won’t live disappointed. Not in people. Not in ourselves. Not in God. Our feelings and faith will nod in agreement. We will return to a purity of emotion where we can experience the best of our hearts working in tandem with the absolutes of truth.
Sometimes to get your life back, you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like. • Disappointment is that feeling things should be better than they are. • Disappointment isn’t proof that God is withholding good things from us. Sometimes it’s His way of leading us Home. • If the enemy can isolate us, he can influence us. • We will never appreciate or even desire the hope of our True Love if lesser loves don’t disappoint. • God knows before we eternally dwell we will have to learn how to wrestle well. • In the new
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Not only was I dealing with deep personal pain, but I was experiencing firsthand the way broken people sometimes contribute to the brokenness of others. We live in a broken world where broken things happen. So it’s not surprising that things get broken in our lives as well. But what about those times when things aren’t just broken but shattered beyond repair? Shattered to the point of dust. At least when things are broken there’s some hope you can glue the pieces back together. But what if there aren’t even pieces to pick up in front of you? You can’t glue dust.
We think the shattering in our lives could not possibly be for any good. But what if shattering is the only way to get dust back to its basic form so that something new can be made? We can see dust as a result of an unfair breaking. Or we can see dust as a crucial ingredient.
Yet You, LORD, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. (ISAIAH 64:8) “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel.” (Jeremiah 18:6)
Dust doesn’t have to signify the end. Dust is often what must be present for the new to begin.
Physical death is the only way to start the process of receiving our heavenly bodies that will never wear out, decay in any way, or ever be reduced to dust.
Death is but a passageway at God’s designated time for us to finally escape this broken world full of imperfections and be welcomed to the Home we’ve been longing for our entire lives. We don’t determine when this is, but we don’t have to fear death as an end. It’s another beginning.
Things crashed. Things broke beyond repair. Things went from being whole to being reduced to dust. I crawled into bed. I willed the world to stop spinning. I wanted everything to pause and stop hurting me. But nothing did. And that’s one of the most devastating realities of dust times in our lives. We need the world to stop spinning for a while. We need things to pause. We need the celebrations to cease long enough to let us work through our grief. We need people with expectations to stop e-mailing us. We need our schedules to clear.
If I want His promises, I have to trust His process. I have to trust that first comes the dust, and then comes the making of something even better with us. God isn’t ever going to forsake you, but He will go to great lengths to remake you. What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?
Feeling the pain is the first step toward healing the pain. The longer we avoid the feeling, the more we delay our healing. We can numb it, ignore it, or pretend it doesn’t exist, but all those options lead to an eventual breakdown, not a breakthrough.
The feeling of the pain is like a warning light on the dashboard of our car. The light comes on to indicate something is wrong. We can deny it. We can ignore it. We can assume it’s a little glitch in the operating panel. We can even go to the mechanic and ask him to turn off that annoying little light. But if he’s a good mechanic, he would tell you it’s foolish not to pay attention to it. Because if you don’t attend to it, you will soon experience a breakdown. The warning light isn’t trying to annoy you. It’s trying to protect you. And pain is much the same. It’s the pain we feel that finally
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You are expressing that your experience of life isn’t matching your expectations of how you thought your life would be. Those feelings are painful. And that pain must be addressed. God helped me see this in a pretty dramatic way last summer.
C. S. Lewis wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Oh, dear God, help me trust You beyond what my physical eyes can see. As the winds of all that’s uncontrollable whip around me and thrash against me, I need something to ground me. Steady me. Hold me together when circumstances are falling apart. I want to trust You beyond what my eyes can see.
This is obedience. This is trust. Obedience is the daily practice of trusting God. So, the only way to gain the kind of trust in God we must have to survive and thrive in this life between two gardens is through the things that we suffer.
But here’s the craziest thing of all. God doesn’t want you or me to suffer. But He will allow it in doses to increase our trust. Our pain and suffering isn’t to hurt us. It’s to save us. To save us from a life where we are self-reliant, self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and set up for the greatest pain of all . . . separation from God.
To trust God is to trust His timing. To trust God is to trust His way. God loves me too much to answer my prayers at any other time than the right time and in any other way than the right way. In the quietness of all that doesn’t feel right, this truth does.
However, God sees things I can’t see. He knows things I don’t know. Only God knows what the good plan is and what it will take to get me there. And most of all He knows, if I saw the full road ahead, I would stop about halfway through and never choose to continue with His plan. I would think the cost is too high, the path too scary, the way too daunting, and the enemy too frightening. No human is strong enough to withstand seeing too much of God’s plan in advance. It must be revealed daily. And we must be led to it and through it slowly.
God isn’t trying to be distant or mysterious or hard to understand. He’s being merciful. We don’t have to know the plan to trust there is a plan. We don’t have to feel good to trust there is good coming. We don’t have to see evidence of changes to trust that it won’t always be this hard. We just have to close our physical eyes and turn our thoughts to Jesus. Fix our thoughts on Him. Say His name over and over and over. God doesn’t want to be explained away. He wants to be invited in. And right now He’s looking for someone, anyone, who will really call on Him.
Father, You are so very good. You can be trusted. Help me mark the hard moments of this day with declarations of my trust in You. There is more to what I’m facing today than what my physical eyes can see. When my pain feels too deep and when I don’t think I can take one more second of suffering, help me recognize Your plan and protection. Help me trade my unbelief for the beautiful relief that I don’t have to figure this out. I just have to fix my thoughts on Jesus and how He will lead me. I mark this moment as a moment of trust. I declare I don’t have to understand. I just have to trust. In
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When you suffer, slow becomes necessary. Slow becomes good. One of the best parts of this season of suffering for me was a life that doesn’t require shoes. When you wear no shoes the sun has access to your feet.
And on a spiritual level it seemed to have some sort of parallel meaning. When you live slow for a season, the Son has access to the parts of you normally covered up by everyday put-ons.
People who deflect their own need for redemption by spotlighting the hurts of others. Make no mistake, those who are the most eager to harshly criticize others are often the ones most desperate to keep hidden their own secret sins or unresolved pain.
After all, I will never be able to control what other people have going on in their heads or in their conversations.
Fear isn’t something you can sweep up into a pile and discard. It isn’t physical. It hovers and haunts us in the spiritual realm. It attacks us in the unseen. So bringing it out in plain sight in the form of a two-piece bathing suit helped me to touch it. Grasp it. And infuse just enough holy grit into my soul to pick the most conservative but still completely dangerous suit from a bottom sales rack and declare battle.
The enemy wants us paralyzed and compromised by the whispers and doubts and what-ifs and opinions and accusations and misunderstandings and all the other hissing handcuffs crafted by fear. Standing there, feeling completely
What gives power to all that I fear others are thinking and accusing and saying isn’t the people themselves. It isn’t even the enemy. I’m the one who decides if their statements have power over me or not. It’s me. And my desperate desire to stay covered up. I don’t want to feel naked in any way. Even though I was technically in a bathing suit, I still felt so exposed. And I don’t want to stand exposed, because I don’t know how to do it and feel unashamed.
When in reality what’s best about me comes to the forefront when I’m closest to the way God created me, naked and unashamed.
To stand naked and unashamed is the way of the garden life. “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25).
“All the worst things you’ve ever wondered about yourself are true.” So, there was no shortage of fuel to help the statements of others, those who knew me and those who just knew about me, travel right to the core of my vulnerabilities and insecurities. I feared their statements, because they simply gave voice to thoughts that already haunted me.
But if someone says something about me that I’ve already wondered about myself, I probably won’t be able to discern if it’s ridiculous or not. I’ll invite that statement in and offer it something to drink and a cozy seat in the corner of my mind. And before I know it, it’s moved in like a bad roommate I never intended to have.
A roommate who comes into my bedroom when I’m trying on a two-piece bathing suit and reminds me of all the reasons I should never turn toward the mirror. Her damning statement?
God’s Word is the Truth. And His Truth says you are a holy and dearly loved child of your heavenly Father. You are wonderfully made. You are a treasure. You are beautiful. You are fully known by Him and lavishly loved by Him. You are chosen. You are special. You are set apart. No matter what you’ve done or what’s been done to you, these words of God are true about you.
When you live slow for a season, the Son has access to the parts of you normally covered up by everyday put-ons. REMEMBER: • I must learn to control how much I allow fear to have access to my life. • The enemy wants us paralyzed and compromised by what-ifs, opinions, accusations, and misunderstandings. • To dwell well in this life between two gardens requires us to make peace with being naked and unashamed. • We must let God’s Word become the words of our story. • I am deeply loved by God, even in my most naked form. RECEIVE: Adam and his wife were
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When there is an undoing of your life, there is an unknowing of every next millisecond. Every next breath. The peaceful predictability of what you thought would be your life is suddenly replaced by a very unexpected darkness and silence you aren’t used to. It’s like when the power suddenly goes out in an office with no windows. It’s jolting. What was full of activity and productivity and plans and important details and bosses bossing and workers working becomes as quiet as a hospice hallway.
Darkness has such a way of swallowing up enthusiasm for the future.
