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November 27 - December 9, 2019
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.
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.
Some will live their whole lives missing the chance to see all the good God has placed around them just for them.
But pretending away reality never makes things better. It just causes you to implode on the inside while smiling on the outside. That’s no way to live. Sometimes to get your life back, you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like.
Disappointment. Whether you’ve used that word or not, it’s there. And I want to wrap a little vocabulary around the feelings that are affecting us more than we realize or dare to verbalize. It’s that feeling things should be better than they are. People should be better than they are. Circumstances should be better than they are. Finances should be better than they are. Relationships should be better than they are.
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.
So the human heart was created in the context of the perfection of the garden of Eden. But we don’t live there now. This is why our instincts keep firing off the lie that perfection is possible. We have pictures of perfection etched into the very DNA of our souls. We chase it. We angle our cameras trying to catch it. We take twenty shots in hopes of finding it. And then even our good photos have to be color corrected, filtered, and cropped.
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.
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.
But if God’s symphony continues to play loud and strong as the ultimate soundtrack of our lives, we will sense how to get back on track. We will feel how to get back in rhythm. We will hear how to get back in tune. It’s just like when I sing along in my car with a well-produced song. With that soundtrack blaring along with me, I sound amazing. But it’s not because I’m suddenly a master musician. It’s because the master musician is louder than me, guiding me, holding me in key and on beat. I wrestle well with the song, because I’m not left on my own to hold it all together. But heaven help us
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But people don’t have funerals for “normal.”
I dealing with deep personal pain, but I was experiencing firsthand the way broken people sometimes contribute to the brokenness of others.
Dust begs us to believe the promises of God no longer apply to us. That the reach of God falls just short of where we are.
Dust is much the same; it’s the basic ingredient with such great potential for new life.
The very things I assume would give me a better life are the exact things that would eventually kill me.
Genesis 2:16, God’s first three words to Adam when telling him the rule of not eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were, “You are free.” God gave him a message of freedom with one restriction for his protection.
But when the serpent quoted this rule to Eve, he changed God’s language of freedom to complete restriction with no freedom at all. When quoting God, the serpent’s first three words were, “You must not” (Genesis 3:1).
When His timing seems questionable, His lack of intervention seems hurtful, and His promises seem doubtful, I get afraid. I get confused. And left alone with those feelings, I can’t help but feel disappointed that God isn’t doing what I assume a good God should do.
My controlling things would prevent the dust required for God to make the new He desperately desires for me.
If I want His promises, I have to trust His process.
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.
breakdown. The warning light isn’t trying to annoy you. It’s trying to protect you.
It’s the pain we feel that finally demands we slow down enough to address what’s really going on below the surface.
I now have a completely different picture of God standing beside my hospital bed while I was hurting and begging Him to help me. He wasn’t ignoring me. No, I believe it took every bit of holy restraint within Him to not step in and remove my pain. He loved me too much to do the very thing I was begging Him to do. He knew things I didn’t know. He saw a bigger picture I couldn’t see. His mercy was too great. His love was too deep.
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.
Think about why we will yank a child back from running across a street. The initial jerk back may cause the child some pain and confusion. But that tiny bit of suffering is for the greater good of saving the child from the worse suffering of getting hit by a car.
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.
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.
To stop trying to make sense of things that make no sense in the middle of the journey. And to stop asking for the knowledge that’s too heavy for us to carry.
Make a different choice than Eve did. She demanded all the knowledge right away in her own way while ignoring God’s way.
if you get desperate enough you’ll go all in with living slow for a while. You’ll quiet down all the outside noise so God’s voice can become the loudest voice in your life.
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.
I’m all for people challenging me with biblical wisdom and considerations birthed in real prayer. But these are conversations that should be had face-to-face with compassionate lips, not articles typed with cold fingertips.
I will never be able to control what other people have going on in their heads or in their conversations. But with the help of the Holy Spirit in me, I can absolutely learn to control how much I allow the fear of their opinions to have access to my life.
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.
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.
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
And I don’t want to stand exposed, because I don’t know how to do it and feel unashamed.
If someone says something about me that’s not true, I should be able to pull a Taylor Swift and simply shake it off. If it’s a ridiculous statement, then it should be like a bad smell that may make me cringe for a few seconds but then passes on by.
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.
Whatever statement was spoken to you that came against the truth must be called a lie! 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.
Who told you that? Aren’t they broken, vulnerable people, with their own hurts and heartbreaks? Might you have compassion for them but not be overpowered by their thoughts? And might you have compassion for yourself? Who told you that you were naked? And who told you that you in your naked form are anything but glorious?
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.
How are you living paralyzed by fear instead of in the reality that you are deeply loved by God?
This is such a ploy of Satan. He loves to take a beautiful moment of life and fill it with a negative narrative about our failures that plays over and over until the voice of God is hushed.
no time showing up and bringing compassion to another human is ever a waste of time.
Release my clenched fist and pouty disappointments, and trade my “live up” mentality for a “show up” one?
