Tag: Christ

Shifting From the Winds to the Eye of the Storm

Have you ever lived in a geographic location where you have to deal with the threat of possible hurricanes?  The weather guy has made his prediction that it’s a category 2 now but may strengthen and make landfall as a category 4 in the next 24 to 48 hours.  Should you run to the store and stock up on bread and bottled water?  Should you go to the nearest gas station and fill your vehicles and multiple gas cans…just in case?  Should you evacuate and hope everything is still standing when the storm is over?  Should you just stay put and not worry about anything because these things usually end up proving to be much less than predicted?

In recent months, I have found that my life has almost always consisted of preparations for the next “hurricane,” but in the last few years I have not been preparing as I should.  It took the most recent hurricane for me to realize just how ill-prepared I really am.  Four weeks ago, I moved out.  I left my husband whom I have been with for the last 25 years, and I am now living with my 22 year old son.  I was not really prepared for this hurricane at all.  At first, I thought the storm would completely blow over and dissipate as real hurricanes often do.  I was wrong.  The hurricane force winds are still blowing all around me as they have done for years, but one thing is very different.  I don’t feel those winds.  I am sitting comfortably in the eye of the storm.  I can see the winds, but they can’t touch me unless I allow myself to shift from the eye of the storm back into the actual storm itself.

Every day I spend out of the winds makes me realize a little more just how hard and how long they have been blowing.  I think I have been trying to stand upright in the strongest of hurricane winds for most of my life.  For years, I have fought to hold my life together using my own strength, but I have always known my own strength would never be enough.  I have always known that God was the only One strong enough to hold anything together, but I have consistently fought giving Him control.  Oh, I say all the right things: “I have given everything in this situation to God and will accept whatever He does to fix it.”  In reality, I may give it to Him, but I keep my grip firmly on one little corner and eventually pull the whole situation, no matter what it is, back on my own shoulders which have proven time and again to be too weak to carry the burden.

I am a fixer by nature.  I fix other peoples’ problems all the time.  I have many people who come to me at the first indication of a problem and ask for my advice and help.  I’ve been told I give good advice.  I help everyone else prepare for whatever hurricane they are living through, but when it comes to my own hurricanes I have consistently found myself ill-prepared.  I know where I need to go for hurricane provisions, but I have avoided gathering those provisions because I was afraid I would not find the answers I wanted mixed in with the bread and bottled water.  I was terrified that I would read Scripture and pray and realize that God never wanted me where I was and definitely wanted me elsewhere.  I have been terrified for a very long time, I think because I have known for a very long time that God did not want me to have ever stepped into the path of these particular winds.  I walked right into these hurricane force winds on my own and begged God to calm the storm.  Of course, He would calm the storm because He does not condone divorce, right?

God did not calm the storm.  He did not stop the winds.  He did not provide any way to survive in the storm.  Instead, He gave me numerous opportunities to walk out of the storm on my own, but I ignored those opportunities.  I was stubborn and stayed just to prove I could and used Scripture in the wrong way in order to excuse my bad decision.  I should have left at year two, at year five and at year twenty, but I didn’t.  I waited until twenty-five years were spent trying to stand in winds that no one can truly stand in.  For now, I will live my life in the eye where the winds cannot touch me.  I will use the hurricane provisions that God has generously supplied and remember, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:13)”

Worry

Worry…I think this one word describes my worst problem, my biggest failure.  I worry about everyone and everything. I worry about my children, my husband, my extended family, my friends, my coworkers, my neighbors, my marriage, my faith, my job, my finances, my church, my Bible study group, my education, my community, my nation, my blog… I even worry about the fact that I worry too much.  I guess you could say worrying has become an addiction in my life.  I truly never realized until I typed that last sentence that I had an addiction to worry.

Jesus was very clear in Matthew 6:25-27 when He instructed us not to worry.  “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?  Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable than they?  Who among you by worrying can add a single day to his life (Matthew 6:25-27 NIV).”  Jesus didn’t give a complicated sermon.  He didn’t weave it into a parable.  He didn’t hesitate or stutter. He gave His message clearly when He instructed us not to worry because it won’t do any good.  No matter how much time and energy you devote to worrying, you will never gain any advantage in whatever situation you are worrying about.  You will simply waste time…time you never get back, time that could have been used productively, time you may have enjoyed, time forever sacrificed on an alter of the great deceiver, that serpent who told the first lie that triggered the first worry.

Worry does two basic things.  It tears down and it builds up.  It tears down the realities of your present and the possibilities of your future.  It tears down your relationships.  It tears down your potential accomplishments.  It tears down your self esteem, your self worth.  It tears down your immune system and destroys your health.  It tears down much that should have been and forever robs your future of those should-have-beens that now may never be.

Worry tears down everything you allow it to, but it must have at least some measure of your permission for worry to be this devastatingly powerful.  You must hand your authority over your own life to worry in order for it to be able to tear down anything.  You made a decision, consciously or unconsciously, to allow your mind to be controlled by worry.  Worry doesn’t have a mind of its own.  It must hijack yours before it can do anything.  How much it tears down is up to you.

The second thing worry does is build up.  It builds walls between you and those around you.  It builds walls between you and God.  It builds walls as tall and as strong as you allow it to build.  If allowed, worry will build walls so tall and so strong that you will feel encased in an impenetrable room with no doors or windows.  You can hear the activity on the other side of the walls but never be able to live life beyond your worry-built walls.

In his letters to the Philippians the Apostle Paul instructed them, “Be anxious (worried) for nothing but in prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Philipians 4:6-7 NIV).” Paul knew what he was talking about.  He suffered persecution and imprisonment for his faith.  When I think of all Paul faced and persevered through because of his faith and service to God, I feel guilty for all the worrying I do.  The guilty feelings don’t automatically erase my natural tendency to worry, but they do remind me that I need to pray my way through my worries and make a conscious and consistent effort to refocus my mind and heart on God’s grace and mercies and put my faith in Him.

I leave you with a quote by George Muller, a preacher from a another generation.  “The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith.  The beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.”

Leading a Horse to Water…Living Water

I wonder if you have you ever heard that old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”  I’ve heard it many, many times over the years and said it a few times as well.  I have never, however, found myself in circumstances that better fit that familiar saying than I find myself in right now.

Life has been less than fun lately.  This less-than-fun stage started because I tried to help someone.  I tried very hard to show someone something it took me a long time to learn.  I had hoped she could learn it much quicker than I did, at a much younger age than I did and that it could help her to be the person she really wanted to be.  I wanted her to see that she didn’t have to let where she came from dictate who she had to be.  She could be a wonderful person, an awesome mother and a wife any man would love to have if she would just step away from her past and step fully into her present…but she wouldn’t do it.  She chose to give her present life to her past life, and she hurt herself and so many others around her when she made that choice that most of those she hurt have walked away from her forever.  Much like the horse in the old saying, I tried so hard to get her to see the water I had led her to, but I couldn’t make her drink.  She didn’t want the water when it was in plain sight.  She would rather continue drinking from the same old puddle that has already proven it will not sustain her. 

I will never truly understand how a person could prefer to slurp water from a muddy puddle than to drink from cold, clear, purified water that is offered to them…especially when the offer has no strings attached.  But maybe I do understand because as I typed that last sentence, I realized I do the same thing all the time.  Jesus has offered us His living water; and, though I have accepted His gift to quench my eternal thirst, I still return every so often to that muddy water and take a little sip.  Sometimes I don’t realize I am kneeling in the mud until after that first sip; but sometimes I know exactly where I am going to end up as I am heading to that puddle, yet I make the conscious decision that I will just stick my fingers in the water and play in the mud a little but never really take a sip.  I know this plan never really works, but I lie to myself and ignore my conscience and get a little muddy anyway.

I am like the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well in the book of John, chapter 4, beginning in verse 7.  I have made more bad choices than I want to allow myself to remember; but, like the woman at the well, He didn’t care how much muddy water I had trudged through.  He shared His eternal living water with me without reservation. 

“When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’ (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

“The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?’ (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

“Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’ 

“‘Sir,’ the woman said, ‘you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and his herds?’

“Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ 

“The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water so I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

I have drank from Jesus living water.  He has forever quenched that eternal thirst in me, but every once in a while I decide to stray off His path and find myself playing in the mud that gets deeper with every step.  Why do I do it?  I don’t know.  I’d like to say that the devil made me do it, but I know better than to listen to that deceiver.  He never makes me play in the mud.  He just makes it look a little less muddy than it really is.  Every time, I can only blame myself and then refocus my eyes back on Jesus and the living water He led me to.

“John 4:7-15.” NIV Archaeological Study Bible: An Illustrated Walk through Biblical History and Culture: New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005. N. pag. Print.