I love it when a progression of
things leads me to a new lesson learned.
It's when things line up in such a way that it can't be
coincidence. It has to be God teaching
me.
David said in the Psalms that he
meditates on God’s precepts all day (“Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.” Ps. 119:97).
He didn't have a copy of the scriptures to study, he had to have them in
his mind. Meditating on scriptures does
a couple of things. First, it keeps God
as your focus throughout the day.
Second, it sometimes brings revelation - or a new Ah-ha! For me, I will keep a verse or passage of
scripture in mind and as I go through the day or week, I will find connections. This week, I focused on simply knowing God
and His character.
This past week I've continued in
our Bible study on hearing the voice of God.
We were looking at how we should not only seek His voice but rather seek
Him and then we are more aligned to hear His voice. I’ve heard this before but, this week, I saw
it in action. I was talking to someone
who struggles with anxiety and when our conversation turned toward learning
something about God’s character and how He interacts with His people, she
relaxed. Her trembling from anxiety
melted away. Simply turning her focus
to God himself was much more effective than praying for God to handle the
situations or to relieve anxiety (that being said, I know fully well that God
can do both of those things!). Often,
those prayers only keep your focus on the stressful situation or anxiety.
So that is parts one and two of
the progression. Part three is a new depth
of understanding that says if I am to simply seek God, which means I will
direct my attention away from the mire, then I am trusting God to handle that
which I've just redirected from. I have
to let go of it. These thoughts then
reminded me of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane struggling with God’s plan for
him. The movie "The Passion"
portrays this scene so well! Jesus was
physically wrestling with it all. He
didn't want what was to come. He knew the path laid before him led to the
cross. He came to the conclusion of
"not as I will, but as you will" (Matt. 26:39). It is interesting to note that Jesus prayed
that prayer three times. It wasn’t easy
for him to come to that conclusion. It’s
one of the places that I see the humanity of Jesus. In considering all this, I really understood,
probably for the first time, that trusting God is bending my will to His.
Part four of the progression is
understanding that I'm feeling like I'm in the garden, in the non-picturesque
sense. Of course, I can’t compare to the
magnitude of the scale of what was ahead of Jesus, but I can relate. I don't know what is ahead for Kelsey and her
medical treatment, but I know I don't want to go through it. I just want it all to miraculously go
away. But that's really not the point,
is it? God has laid out a path that is before
us. That is not to say I think that God
designed this illness to happen. Rather,
I recognize that so far He has determined we need to walk through it. The task, then, is to seek Him first,
trusting that the rest of the crap will fall in place – in His hands.
Just now as I write this, I
am reminded of what I have said so often to myself and to God during these last two years:
“Into your hands, O Lord.”
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