I love problem solving, or at least trying to. Sometimes it can really get me hung up though. I have this dear friend who loves to remind me of my over analytical tendencies with the phrase “paralysis of analysis”. Catchy, right? 🙂
God is showing me that I have long been analyzing everything I lack and trying to fix it. I long for growth and new depth in my walk with Christ, but end up trying to attain it by fixing myself up to match what I read in scripture. I evaluate and analyze and critique myself to death, often draining the joy out of walking with Jesus. But then I recognize that the joy has lessened so then I critique and analyze and evaluate why I’m not joyful….geez, this is making me tired just typing it out. It’s no wonder I have struggled for so long to live more fully in the freeing love of Christ!
Since just before the race began, God began stirring my heart on the topic of rest. My initial assumption was the obvious rest from “doing” or activity. Over the last month and a half, He has been showing me a greater depth to this idea of rest. The Lord has been taking me to some new places in leading worship (especially as I am currently leading at least 4 times a week). Really, it’s simply a place of requiring more dependence on Him and freedom to allow Him to speak. I’m a verbal processor, and with all I just shared about analyzing, it should be no surprise that I spend a lot of time talking and “figuring things out” in my prayers and journals. 🙂 However, lately, I have been left speechless. I’m at a place where I feel like I’ve said everything I could think of to figure out what I should do. I began noticing recently that in moments of worship through music or sitting in quiet, I was simply taking deep breaths cause I literally couldn’t find anything meaningful to say. If I tried, it felt like a bunch of empty words. Last week, the Lord revealed to me this idea that I treat my relationship with Him like a job – 24/7 evaluating my performance, trying to prove I was worth “hiring”, trying to impress my boss. In usual fashion, I searched and racked my brain trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with this and how I would change this mindset. Sometime over the following 2 days, God spoke to my spirit and said, “Stop! It’s not your job to fix yourself, that’s Mine!” Wow. My jaw dropped, and I sat in silence.
Our squad mentor sent me a sermon (by Caroline Crawford) on rest after reading an email where I had mentioned this lesson. I just had a chance to listen to it this past Friday. I smiled as the speaker began by talking about learning new ways to communicate with God, and the newest being through breathing. She discussed how rest is linked to a settled faith, and has nothing to do with how you feel and the environment around you. It’s a gift and part of the inheritance we’ve been given through Jesus as children of God. Quiet is not weakness and does not mean absence. Sitting into and resting in a truth allows us to make a declaration and then simply release it. She posed the question/challenge, “Are you going to take whatever it is that you want so badly to be a truth in your life and just decide to rest in it as truth and not be so concerned about all the reasons maybe it’s not?” Challenge accepted.
Funny enough, my teammate and I taught a class on our inheritance in Christ last week, and it was based off the covenant God made with Abraham regarding Israel. We talked about God’s commitment to His faithfulness toward Israel, and ultimately toward us with the new covenant. This morning I was reading in Exodus and the conversation at the burning bush stood out to me. When God told Moses he was to go to the pharaoh and declare the Lord said, “Let my people go!”, he said, “Who am I?” God told him, “I will be with you.” Moses was so consumed with what he could see in himself, or couldn’t see, that he didn’t recognize God’s promise to be faithful to the covenant that had been established a good 400 years earlier. Not only does God’s promise of “I will be with you” remain for us today; but through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit. God is not only with us, but He is WITHIN us and He desires us to rest in that.
So I am learning to rest in my promised inheritance that I have full access and rights to the power and love and wisdom and strength and joy and everything else that is held in the name of Jesus. No problem of mine or anyone else’s is mine to fix. As we go out to pray for people seeking healing or deliverance or whatever else, I no longer want to be paralyzed by the question “Who am I?”, but rest and lean into my Savior who is “I AM”.
Rest is power, and a sword that slices off of me everything that is incompatible with the Spirit inside me. The rested person carries a confidence that God will work things out even if He doesn’t show him how. -Caroline Crawford
