It was the end of the month debrief in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. As our squad gathered for a few days before our transition to Vietnam, the Lord put two simple questions on my heart.
Are you ready to truly surrender?
Are you willing to go deeper and give me even more?
To be honest the questions kind of caught me off guard. That night as I spent time journaling and in prayer I began to have a selfish reaction stir up in my heart.
“God, don’t you see what I’m doing? Don’t you see how much I’m giving you? The sacrifices I am making. The challenges I face every day. What do you mean I haven’t surrendered things to you? How can I give you more when I’m giving you everything I have?”
I sat up on a rooftop of our hostel and for the first time in my life began to understand a little bit of what Jacob was talking about when he ‘wrestled with God’. The mix of emotions was strong, and I wasn’t sure where some of them were coming from. A bit of frustration, some confusion and just a general lack of understanding.
As I sat there with all those emotions tensing up my heart I felt these words, almost as light as a whisper…’My Son, I love you.’ Such a simple phrase, but the frustrations and confusion began to melt away almost like a winter thaw. As the emotions faded I was able to realize that I was holding onto some things I needed to surrender. There was a part of me that was clinging to some ideas of what the future would bring, both immediate and down the road. Desires of my heart that were dangerously close to becoming expectations. I was forgetting what it was to truly hold everything in life with an open palm, ready for whatever unexpected turn our journey takes.
Him asking me to give even more these last couple months of squad leading? Asking me to go even deeper with him? It scares the crap out of me. There are so many moment in my life already that I find myself in a place I can’t do anything but rely on God.
Deeper? It’s like swimming in a lake and needing a breath of air. We reach a depth we don’t feel comfortable at and race to the service to breathe in the life we need to function…but we find we could have gone a little further than we realized. The beauty of our lives is God is that breath of life, the air that fills our lungs. HE is life. And as our lives begin to reflect that truth we will realize that without having to backtrack to get ‘air’ we thought we needed he can take us to a depth we never imagined.
Back to those words, ‘My Son, I love you.’
I was reminded of those simple and yet powerful words that night. That His love for us is so great he will never cease pursuing his children. That he will never stop calling us to a greater depth. That he will never stop asking for ALL of us.
So here I stand, in a place of surrender. Ready to dive to an even deeper depth these next few months. Not holding my breath, because he is the breath in my life. His love for me is too great to stop asking for all of me….and I’m smiling ear to ear thinking about what comes next.
