Brokenness and Obedience Really are Good

You ever meet somebody or go back to a place and once again remember how much it stirs your heart and makes you feel alive inside? That’s often mountaineering for me. I love gazing into the Tetons from the valley below when a storm is dumping snow onto these rugged faces that have never stopped haunting and alluring me.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a trip Summer and I took through Wyoming and Montana, once again stirring in me deep excitement and desire while gazing into the wildness, the fury, and the beauty of the mountains. I wanted to be absorbed into their power, to disappear into the peaks that would occassionally unveil themselves from the storms for just a small and almost seductive glimpse before hiding once again. We had the amazing opportunity to do some snowshoeing in both the Absarokas of Montana and the Tetons in Wyoming as we drove through to meet with friends and “borrow” a few of my belongings from my storage locker in Bozeman.

There were several points during that week that distaste, frustration, even rebellion against God wanted to rise up within me. Is that you God? Why? Do you know what you are asking? How can I trust you? How can I trust that this is now your voice — are you just allowing me to be confused again? How can I discern your voice from the enemy’s?

And yet God is guiding me, asking me to look to Him and not my struggles with discerning His voice in the past. Paul says in Romans 7:22, “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.” Am I willing to kneel before Him, raise my hands in worship, or sing what my heart longs to express, despite how I look? Am I willing to sacrifice doing what I feel like doing, am I willing to lead others in obedience and through challenges even when I stand to be rejected?  Am I willing to be obedient in ways that seem small and insignificant right now to trust that I will ultimately delight in what God is asking me to do?

As I look forward to heading to Spain in less than two months, training isn’t on pause; character building hasn’t stopped.  As I prepare for more training at G42 for a lifelong commitment to share His love with others, I’m realizing that the time I have until then is just as critical. And the preparation that is most important is also the hardest; God still is breaking and changing my character even during this time of “rest.”

For the past few years, the idea of hearing God’s voice has been a struggle that’s frustrated me…I’ve sometimes chosen to act on what I’ve believed has been from Him…and other times have buried what I’ve thought to be His voice, running away in fear that I’m not getting His voice right, that what I feel in my heart or conscience is wrong, or that I can’t discern His voice from the enemy. Others I’ve talked to in my struggle have discouraged me from trying to hear from our living God, bringing up stories they’ve heard of people getting that voice wrong, setting them on an unwise path to ultimately crash and burn…saying that God doesn’t intend for us to hear His voice in this age anymore.

And yet increasingly, both my desire deep down to hear…to listen to God and not just speak to Him doesn’t go away. And my increasing conviction that burying His voice and making excuses, although it seems safe, is being disobedient. And I think God is once again bringing me to the place of taking the risk to act on what very well may be God. I’m scared that I’ll get Him wrong…and maybe even sometimes more scared that He will ask me to make sacrifices in that obedience that I don’t want to make. And yet at the same time I’m learning even more deeply that obedience when nothing makes sense is still Him loving us, and is far more secure than finding our own way.