Last night I sat in the backyard of the bible college we are staying at this month. It is a lovely spot that is a spacious place – with the room, and for the moment the time, to meet with God in a quiet place. As I soaked in this moment, I found tears in my eyes, my heart hardly knowing what it wanted to process.
Part of it may have been the exhaustion of two days of travel catching up with me…both the sleepless night on a bus and a long day of carrying my pack around the city, in the metro, on a public bus, and then walking numerous miles, including several up a small mountain.
My body is weary and bruised. But I am in great anticipation of what God wants to do this month, amazed by the beauty of this country and culture we are in, and blessed by the place God has given us to live this month. So why did the tears come? Granted, it is a woman’s right to cry just for the sake of crying…but there is surgery on my heart.
The past few days have revealed even more my lack of trust in God. The struggle is just as real on the ‘mission field’ as it ever was at home.
Over and over, even in the last month of travels, He has shown Himself to be beyond faithful…surrounding me with so many blessings that I could not have imagined.
But how much do I actually trust Him?
I have had the seasons of dependence, where I have had to trust Him to meet my needs, but there is always the temptation to stress or imagine the ‘what if’s’. Yet here there is an invitation to stop wading at the shore and to jump in to deeper waters. To trust implicitly and in totality, without borders.
This terrifies me. Childlike faith…it sounds so easy, but is so hard once you learn the art of distrust.
The heart of God is the place of perfect safety. He is a strong tower and refuge. He has proved that over and over again in my life. Yet placing a trust without borders into the hands of a dangerous – if good – God is not a place of safety. It is a place where you are called out of comfort into life.
I long for it as much as I fear it.
Since leaving on the Race, it feels like God has taken me back to the beginning. Not building up what He has already sown in, but going back to the foundations to remove and replace.
This hurts. A lot.
He has not toppled the other things He has already taught me, but has held me in a cocoon – a hiding place – even here, where it feels like there is nowhere to hide…until my trust in Him is founded.
At the callings of both Moses and Gideon – my two favorite fainthearts of the Bible – their responses are very similar, and resound with my own fears: ‘Who am I?’ ‘But Lord…I am the weakest in my [weak] family.’
God’s answer to each…and to my own heart: ‘I will be with you.’ Not a promise of an easy road, but a road filled with all that He is: beauty, adventure, joy, life….
Taste and see that the Lord is good;
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him
Fear the Lord, you His saints,
For those who fear Him lack nothing.
Psalm 34:17-18
Today I stood in the center of a cathedral in Sofia. More than the grandeur of the architecture or the magnitude of the structure, I was awed by the whisper, the very presence of God in this place….the palpable weight of glory in a place where His presence had been requested, and by extension has resided, for centuries.
I am not Catholic, but I felt a strong urge to light a candle. On this sacred ground, not knowing others reasons or traditions for lighting candles, I lit a candle as an altar to the Lord: to begin to trust without borders.
His invitation is extended to you as well. You can have as much of Him as you want. How much will you trust Him? His pursuit of our hearts is reason enough to trust Him completely. He has not once given up on us, not once said we are too much, a hopeless case, or just not worth it. He is not only the One constant, He is relentless.
