I am beginning to realize from writing out my own story of change that I am a process kind of girl. Maybe it is because I am exceedingly strong-willed and stubborn, or maybe it is because I am a thinker and a wrestler… whatever it is, I often need the journey from the place my feet were standing to the place they are standing. I rarely just jump from one to the other.
So, in the spring of 2006 my feet were still making their home in a camp marked by disappointment, hurt and doubt in God’s goodness, but my toes were pointing towards another direction. Hope had awakened in me through the stories of my previous post and I was primed and ready to start walking…. Of course I did not know these things at the time.
By happenstance I was at my mom’s house on a Monday night that spring and she invited me to a bible study she was going to at a church we had visited prior to joining the Summit. One of my good friends was also going and so I think I agreed because I didn’t have anywhere else to go and thought it would be nice to see Kristen.
I wonder what it must be like for the heart of God to watch detailed plans for our freedom set in motion. I had no idea when I walked into that study that my little feet stuck in such animosity towards God were about to start running straight towards Him.
The book of the bible we were studying was Hosea, which is the story of a harlot who represented the nation of Israel and her husband, who represented the heart of God, passionate for His people. It was titled A Love that Will Not Let Me Go.
Could anything have been more perfect?
I walked into that class struggling to believe that God was for me… I still regarded Him as aloof and distant and uncaring and angry and deaf to my cries for mercy and grace. I realize now, and may have then, that a lot of my anger towards Him resulted from the fact that I didn’t want to worship a God who could redeem my life and use all of its wounds for good. I wanted instead for Him to restore me back to the person I was prior to all of my mistakes. I wanted everything undone and fixed, convinced I would go back to trusting Him then… when I didn’t have a reason to anymore.
It’s crazy how much your life makes sense looking backwards: I believed my plans were better than His and that my desires for my life were paramount to my happiness instead of His for me. I realize that I believed what I had done and what it could mean for my life were larger than what I believed about God’s sovereignty. I technically believed all the “right” things about the Lord, all the while my heart was at war because I really doubted that He was good and for me and previous to all parts of me. This is why I was miserable.
So, I sat in that class and studied at home this story of a man who kept pursuing his wife, though she continuously left him for other lovers, and finally begin to understand that this love was an image of what God had done and still does for me. I learned that He will hedge your path and block your way… that He will take you to the desert, the very place I hated, to speak tenderly to you.
I’m pretty sure that it was in this class, through this book, that I realized I was wrong. I still hated the desert. I still wanted out… But finally my ears could hear tender words spoken to me and my feet begin to feel the rock of God’s sovereignty take shape as a firm foundation on which to stand.
I was walking, people!
