All of my life I have heard how lucky we are in America. Time and time again, I have heard various people rant, rave, argue, discuss, and expostulate about how much we take for granted regarding our freedom. I thought I understood this idea. I stored the guidance in my head, and convinced myself that a cerebral knowledge of our “freedom” was enough. God shattered all of those illusions this month. For a while now, the Lord has been trying to teach me how to take all of the “head knowledge” I have about Him and turn it into “heart knowledge.” Due to my slightly stubborn nature, this is not an easy process for me. Thankfully, our God is a patient God, and His steady persistence has made some headway in my life. This month, He gave me true heart knowledge of the freedom we have to worship Him.
While we were in China, we were not allowed to speak directly about God at all. I learned very quickly that this is an incredibly hard thing to do (On a side note, I was glad to know that it wasn’t easy for me not to talk about Him). In order to compensate, we adapted some code words because there was no way we could completely extract Him from our conversations. Could you imagine living in a place where you were not allowed to talk about the people you love? Not being able to tell people about how He spoke to me during a quiet time or something I learned about Him from the Bible was so frustrating. I started to eventually wonder why I have never experienced this frustration before. The Lord then made me start thinking about my conversations about Him when I do have freedom. Do I talk about Him freely? Do I take advantage of the opportunity to tell people about who He is or what He has done? Was I only so eager about talking about Him in China just because we weren’t allowed to? These are hard questions. I had to dig down and be completely honest with myself. I had to ask God to show me the answer to these questions. Unfortunately, I have to admit that before coming on the race, and even more specifically before China, I was not as public or outspoken about my God as I should be. He has done so much in my life. He is so awesome, amazing, loving, incredible, wise, strong, beautiful, caring, kind, good, just, righteous, merciful, gracious, etc. This list could go on forever and still the words would not be adequate enough to describe Him. How can I not speak of Him?
Ultimately what God showed me is that I am more in love with Him now than I was before. When you have someone in your life that is really important to you and that you love very much, you talk about that person all the time. Your thoughts revolve around that person, and consequently your words do too. The further along in this journey I go, the more He consumes my thoughts, and the more I can’t help but talk about Him. I have to praise Him for the opportunity to go to China and understand what it’s like when you can’t speak freely about Him. I won’t so easily take for granted the freedom we have to talk about Him in other places. I pray the same for everyone back home. I pray that you make the most of the freedom you have been blessed with. At the same time, I know our human nature. I know that until we lose something, we don’t truly appreciate it. So I thank the Lord for the opportunity to learn that lesson, and pray that more people get that chance so we won’t be silent about Him.
