“And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.”
Psalm 139:24
That verse is a prayer I pray to the Lord quite often.
As I prepare emotionally & spiritually to leave on this missions trip, my prayer is the same. For the Lord to show me my hindrances, to show me lies that I was taking for truth & to give me the truths to extinguish those lies. To cure old wounds I had hidden under band-aids because they stung at His touch.
And He showed me my hindrances.
And He showed me the lies.
And He brought the residue in my soul to light.
When I left to Georgia I went with my sins & scars in full view, but also with the comforting assurance that my Father will take care of me, & that He wants to. He doesn’t raise me as a daughter out of obligation, but out of love & by choice. All that He requires is my compliance with His direction.
His direction which He’ll repeat as many times as we need, I’ve found…because throughout training camp all I heard from the Lord were echoes. Reiteration of truth He had spoken to me before. Reminders, realizations & convictions repeated to me firmly & lovingly. Repetition, as if to tell me I didn’t need to just hear these things with my ears, but with my heart & spirit as well.
Echoes of things I had heard already, but it seems one can hear without really listening.
Truth & revelation reverberated through the caverns of my soul, which is exactly what I had asked Him for.
The Lord doesn’t leave unfinished business in His people, He doesn’t do partial redemption. And the refining & consecrating takes time, it takes some repetition because we can be a little deaf & dumb sometimes.
It takes echoes.
Here are some of the echoes that resonated in me at training camp:
+ Comparison is the thief of joy. I know this from experience. As someone who has struggled with self-hatred most of my life, I know undoubtedly that comparison cultivates misery & discouragement. The Lord did not create us to live from a place of competition, He created us to live from a place of compassion. Do not compare. God made each person a singular masterpiece, so unique & complex we’re incomparable. A hydrangea doesn’t compare itself to a carnation, it just blooms. So…just bloom. Choose joy.
+ Denial is not just a river in Egypt. God knows every thought, word & deed & its hidden motives inside of us. He’s intimately acquainted with all of our ways. No use trying to hide. The Lord can’t redeem what we don’t admit, so be brutally honest with yourself & Jesus.
+ God is omnipresent, WiFi is not…and that is such a good thing. My ten days at training camp were lived without my iPhone in my hand, & they were as wonderful as they were challenging. I enjoyed not living in double-mindedness, in a constant state of distraction with one foot in my current environment & the other in an unfinished Facebook conversation. It forced me to be present: I wasn’t able to hide behind my phone in awkward social situations, I wasn’t able to consult my Mom before confiding in my God, I wasn’t able to Google everything I pondered. It was awesome. Disconnecting makes space for reconnecting & interacting how humans ought to interact, especially humans sold out for Jesus.
+ I am where I am supposed to be. I ask the Lord to confirm things an unnecessary amount of times, & this time was no different. He had previously told me in a myriad of ways that the World Race was His will for this season, but the clincher in really knowing for sure was the way He spoke to me at camp & how it all reaffirmed & lined up with things He had already put on my heart. Not only were there echoes restating the lessons I’m sharing now, but there were prophecies reaffirmed from my past, parallels that went beyond coincidence & a peace resting on me, letting me know I was right in the palm of His hand.
+ It is not good for man to be alone, but it is very good for man to be alone with God. I’m an introvert, but I rejoice in the fact that humankind was made for God first & then each other. Times alone with our Lord are the platform from which we launch into ministry, but we cannot walk as Jesus walked unless we walk among people. We cannot practically work out selfless love in isolation. Relationships are beautiful & necessary, albeit a little difficult. The disciples went out in pairs for a reason.
+ Building up walls around oneself is never God’s will. Apprehension, fear & skepticism are not traits that are necessary for keeping a disciple on the straight & narrow. Zeal, discernment & wisdom are & they are honed through times of intimacy with the Father. We are called to guard our hearts & minds & so we must, but the Lord is perfectly capable of being our Shield & Shelter, He never asked us to be our own.
+ Intimidation is an illusion, hierarchy is a hallucination. I spent a lot of my life carefully trying to stay within the confines of my own league. Kind of drifting around the outskirts of social circles, feeling automatically rejected by beautiful/talented/charismatic/popular people, & honestly this has been one of the hardest things to come out of. But God worked a huge breakthrough in this area at training camp through a squad-mate & it was amazing. In the Lord there is no totem pole we must climb, there are no leagues, no ranks in which I’m the lowest. The Lord shows no partiality.
+ Don’t fear the tears, don’t be a stuffer. Crying is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of progress, release, & healing. I still don’t like to do it, but I now refuse to bottle things up to the point of breaking.
+ Underestimating oneself is essentially underestimating Christ within us & it’s a gigantic waste of time. This truth struck me as I successfully finished my fitness test & actually jogged the last little bit with my 40 pound pack on my back. I spent a lifetime believing I was incapable in so many ways, including physically, because the world told me I was. I struggled with gym/fitness anxiety, & just general feelings of inferiority for years until the Lord brought release recently. The amount of time I spent underestimating myself because I believed the lies of the enemy is staggering. Stand on truth, you won’t regret it.
+ God did not make a mistake on me physically, emotionally, intellectually, creatively, historically, genetically, geographically, or spiritually. I have fallen. I have been marred & broken in the past, but every fault I find within myself is either no fault at all or not His fault at all. One morning at camp we spent in worship, asking the Lord to speak to us as we meditated on His Word, prayed, or sat silently with pen, paper, & paint. This is what I heard Him say: “I made you exactly as I had intended. With great attention to detail. I don’t make defective women.” For a lot of my life I identified as a screw-up, & tend to fall back into that identity from time-to-time, but God squashed that label one quiet morning with watercolor paints in Georgia.
+ The war I wage daily is not me against the world, it’s the Father of Lights against the Father of Lies. We wrestle not with flesh & blood, but with powers & principalities.
+ Residual sin is still sin. Holding onto old thinking patterns & sins by a thread robs us of the opportunity to completely trust God. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. Don’t hang on to what destroys you because the enemy has convinced you it protects you.
+ The Lord smiles at me. He doesn’t just look down hopelessly shaking His head wishing I’d smarten up. And God actually spoke to me at training camp through something as commonplace as a text from my Dad as I turned on my phone to find my flight info. The text said that He “missed my b-e-a-utiful laugh”, a simple statement that brought me to tears. The Lord worked a lot on showing Himself to me as Father, & used my own Dad to teach me what my relationship with my heavenly Father is supposed to be like: He misses me when I retreat, He longs to see me joyful, & He genuinely wants what’s best for me.
+ God doesn’t task us with taking inventory of our downfalls & fixing them. He convicts, refines, empowers & disciplines His children Himself.
+ Life is not a perpetual to-do list. De-clutter your heart & mind, cease striving & know that He is God.
+ You are genuinely beautiful. I’ve heard this so many times from Him, & it’s probably time to believe it. The world says there is one way to be beautiful, while the Lord has made humanity a melting pot of stunning beauty. Society has an ideal, but His version of beauty lies in diversity, so (apparently) I am just as beautiful as anyone who’s gorgeousness has ever blown my mind. Lol. He tells me that’s true…His people tell me it’s true & I resolve to really believe it in my heart-of-hearts one day. We’re working on it;). Haha.
+ Home is wherever the Spirit leads. Home is wherever I’m with Yahweh.
+ He is not a Halfway Healer. Like I stated before, He is not a God of partial redemption. He wants every last molecule of His beloved, and that’s beautiful.
So yeah.
I praise the Lord for granting us insight, it’s a relief to know that He doesn’t leave His children to flounder in ignorance..that He has the patience to say some things…
…over…
& over…
& over…
& over…
& over…
again, until we “…abide by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer…” (from James 1:25).
