A Dam in the River of Life

As most of you reading have gathered by now, I am absolutely not consistent with keeping up on writing blogs. Now I have the wonderful undertaking of filling everyone in on two months of changes, challenges, thoughts, and overall craziness. It is hard enough to write about some of the things going on, let alone recapping two month worth. However, strange as it may be, I know exactly where to start and have a very good idea of where God wants me to go with it, so buckle up, this may take a few long posts to get through.
 
Join me as I reminisce about Nepal and the things that God taught me there. First of all, a little bit of back story. Our team had been doing door to door ministry all that month. For 3 or 4 days we went out with a group of bible students to a village that was way out in a jungle-ish area of Nepal to continue doing door to door ministry. Now at this point I had already had breathing difficulties for about a week. I had no idea what the problem was and neither did the doctors, even though they acted like they did.
 
So to make a long story short, my breathing problem was so bad out in this village that I had to sit out on ministry. There were already all sorts of frustrations that I was dealing with, so adding this to the list did not help. Feelings of uselessness crept in, and they dragged all of the other frustrations with them, until finally I was simply angry through and through. I didn’t know what to do with myself and felt like I was slipping into a depression. There wasn’t anything that stirred any passion in me.
 
So let’s talk quickly about bathing. Bathing in this village basically equates to sitting in a shallow stream and using a rock to scrub your body (sounds crazy but it works wonders) and yes, soap is used as well. So one morning we went down to bathe and I found myself just sitting in the deepest part of the stream with the fastest moving water for an extended period of time just staring into the distance. As I sat there I eventually began to pray, and asked God what in the world was going on. In that moment I felt as though God was saying to me, “throw rocks.” Of course I had no idea what that meant or what it was supposed to do, but because I was so angry I happily obliged. So I started throwing the rocks that I was sitting on, and just kept throwing. Some were as big as my hand, others as big as my head.
 
After a while I still didn’t know what I was doing so I asked God, “Why am I throwing these rocks.” And I felt Him saying back to me, “you have some things in you and about you that you need to get rid of.” So the rock throwing continued, but now every rock represented something in me that was stifling my relationship with the Father, things like pride, self image, my need to perform, and the like. And then finally, after about 10 minutes of throwing rocks I stopped, and I noticed that I was sitting so much deeper in the water and that so much water was washing over me that I was almost being washed away. And then I felt God explain everything. I wanted to go deeper in my walk with God, and God wanted me to go deeper with Him and show me more about Himself. In John it says that “Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” But I had built a dam in that river by holding onto all of these things. Christ had already redeemed me, but I was too stubborn to let go of certain things and let the rivers of life flow. After that we went back to small church we were staying in and I wept and prayed for the next two hours. God had brought me to a place of brokenness so that he could heal me and build me up into something stronger.
 
From that day on Nepal was completely different. I looked forward to ministry and actually wanted to spend as much time as possible with our ministry contacts. There was a joy in me that I had not experienced and I loved it. There was a new experience of God’s love and grace given through Christ. That his grace is sufficient and that it allows us to put off the old self and put on the new self. Grace that lets us forget what is behind and strive toward what is ahead. Grace that allows you to say boldly that what Jesus did for me is more than enough, and because of that I don’t need to fake anything or be someone who I’m not to win His favor. That I can deal with the reality of who I am and where I am because it was His grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace shall lead me home.