When I first realized I was going to get to blog the whole time for this trip, I don't think the content theme so far was anything close to what I expected to be writing about. I was expecting it to be more like my first couple… strong, victorious, inspiring. Instead I seem to be in a season of brokenness which, don't get me wrong, is fantastic, but that's where a lot of my writing is coming from and even if that means I have to give up my pride and lose the awesome, all together image I'd like to portray, I'm sure there's more that can connect with this than with being superman so… let's dive in! haha
Seth Barnes has a crazy way of hitting right where I'm at in life everytime I pick up his book "Kingdom Journeys", it's like it was written for me, I can pick it up one day and it hits the need to give up everything and go out and I'm like yes! this is it!!! And then I won't read it for a couple weeks and I pick it up and….it's a whole chapter about brokenness…. Ya know…. right where I'm at… That moment when you're so used to having it all together, think you've learned the answers, or at least the guiding lines to most of them, and then you wake up one day and go… how did I get here and why is everything I ever thought not happening or working?
Ah yes, brokenness… my favorite season to love and hate at the same time…
Have you ever had a splinter pulled out? You know it hurts as the other person digs around and pokes and prods in order to get to it and pull it out and yet… it's the best kind of pain because you know if it's not pulled out then it'll only fester, become infected, and put you in a worse place than the pain of taking it out to begin with. For some reason I seem to remember getting a lot of splinters growing up and my mom would always take them out, training me to "not think about the pain, focus on something happy like candy land". I tend to notice that it worked rather well.
The Bible says that Jesus endured the cross "for the joy set before Him". Crazyness… So He put up with the most excruciating, humiliating death imaginable…. because He was focused on the joy it would bring of being reunited with His bride at long last after all those years…. (I'm just now really getting this revelation and it's overwhelming…I'm actually tearing up in a coffee shop right now but hey….whatever….it's Jesus, soooo worth it)
That's why getting splinters pulled, why brokenness, is so needed… There's such a great joy set before me, because Jesus loves me so so so so much just the way I am…and yet who I am right now isn't who He's made me to be and He couldn't really be my passionate king, view me as the apple of His eye, be my laid down lover, or my best friend, and then still just let me go on living the way I have….not when there's so much better out there.
Some of the greatest breakthrough in our life comes from brokenness….Case and point…. A man named Steven was at a prayer meeting one night and he was praying to God and he said "Lord, if my life with start a revival in the hearts of the youth in America, then I gladly give it to you." That night on his way home, he got in a car accident and was killed, leading his best friend into a season of brokenness and confusion because it shook up the norm. As a way to vent, his friend wrote a song, completely out of the rawness of "God, I'm so angry with you and I don't understand why you'd take Him like this but through it all you're so good and you love me" and that song became "How He Loves" by John Mark Mcmillan… you know… the song that everybody's cried to at least once out of a realization of God's raw, furious, unending, wholly devoted love towards us no matter what….The one that's brought so many people either to, or back to Christ within the last several years since it's release and cover by almost every christian artist out there…
Psalm 34:18 says "God is near to the brokenhearted; He rescues those who's spirits are crushed." I'm gonna just be raw here for a second…. that's me….and that very well could probably be you if you're honest with yourself…. and yet my God is sooooo good….and He loves me sooo much…and He wouldn't let me go through anything I couldn't handle or overcome and I will be so so so much better off because of this season…
And all of a sudden, I am overwhelmed by these afflictions eclipsed by glory, and I realize just how beautiful you are, and how great your affections are for me.
Think that's about all I got…. in the words of ol Forrest Gump….that's all I have to say about that 😉
