In all honesty, I am struggling to write this blog post because I don’t want to. I struggled to share this information with my closest friends, my boyfriend, my small group, and even my counselor. So sharing it on a blog where anyone and everyone has the ability to read it seems like a less than ideal situation for my heart, but I promised myself I would be honest through this blog and I want to keep that promise. So here goes nothing.
I keep saying that the race is going to be constant spiritual warfare, but then I realized- I am already right in the middle of it.
Spiritual warfare is not something that you can see coming from a distance. It doesn’t give you a friendly warning that it is about to arrive and take over your entire mind and body. It doesn’t knock on your heart and ask to come in with its all-encompassing ways. It simply starts attacking you in every day-to-day situation without you even realizing it. I learned in Haiti that there is almost no way for you to realize that you are in the midst of spiritual warfare. You can’t recognize that you are under spiritual attack, but others can.
These last three weeks have been filled with a sense of numbness, longing, desperation, and emptiness and until this past Sunday, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I felt stagnant and my “easy way out” was to blame it on the upcoming World Race. Since deciding to go and follow God’s calling on my heart, I have known what is coming next in my life after graduation. I felt as if I was not having to live in complete surrender to God’s timing and His will anymore because I had my plan mapped out for me. I have just been dragging my feet in a sense, counting down the days until we launch in October. I was just barely getting by on a day to day basis and became extremely complacent in my walk with God.
He became a second thought to me. He became more of an acquaintance in my life instead of an intimate friend and Savior. Don’t get me wrong, I was still going through the motions with my body but my heart was far removed. I was in church on Sunday mornings. I was at Bible study on Monday mornings. I was at small group on Monday nights. I was at another Bible study on Wednesday mornings. I was doing all of these things, but I was not doing them wholeheartedly. I don’t even think I was doing them half-heartedly.
Throughout those three weeks, I was caught in the storm that is spiritual warfare but I could not recognize it because I was right in the eye of the hurricane. When I was in the peak of my battle with depression a few years ago, I would sleep for hours on end because sleeping was my way of avoiding the pain that I was feeling. Over the past couple weeks, I was napping more than I ever have in about two years because I was just drained emotionally and spiritually. I could not figure out what was going on in my heart, so instead of bringing it to God, I just went to sleep. It was the only way I knew how to cope.
I was reading a quick devotion whenever I felt like I had a minute in my hectic schedule to spare and give to God. I was letting petty, small frustrations take over my heart and fester into unwarranted anger. I was mistreating those around me, not necessarily to their face but in the thoughts I had in my mind about them. I was praying whenever I needed something from God. I was journaling, but they were empty words. I was letting myself get overwhelmed and discouraged with finances and this fundraising process. I kept asking God to prove Himself to me. To prove that He still loves me, to prove that He still cared, and to prove that He had not walked away from me because I felt so distant from Him.
And then my much needed wake-up call happened.
God does not need to prove Himself to me. He already did that by sending His son to die on the Cross for me, and that’s proof enough. God never walked away from me and I know that He absolutely never will. God was not distancing himself from me, He was patiently waiting for me to fall back into His loving, open arms.
I have two very close friends in my small group who are wonderful about speaking life into me but they were relentless about it the last couple of weeks. They recognized that I was struggling and were constant in their check ins throughout the week, their encouragement and their prayers. It is no surprise that in the moment that I immediately knew God had ignited the fire my heart they were the two people sitting on either side of me in a church worship with their hands on me praying over me. They might never understand how much that moment meant to me but it was just an incredible reminder of how God has hand-picked these friendships and how vital they are in my walk with Him.
A few months ago I heard Joyce Myer use the phrase “New level, New devil” when preaching on spiritual warfare. She is far better at explaining this phrase than I will ever be, but it went something like this… The enemy hates those who are working to advance God’s Kingdom. The Gospel is spreading all across God’s nations, but there is nothing that makes the enemy more frustrated or angry than seeing people come to know Christ. With every new level of faith we step into as we walk with God, you will uncover a deeper and deeper desire to advance God’s Kingdom by making disciples, and with each new level comes a stronger attack by the devil. New level, New Devil.
Over the last couple of months through this World Race journey, I have seen God move mountains in ways I never thought imaginable. Funds are coming in unexpectedly, plans are coming together and my faith in Him only grows stronger, so the enemy wants to attack me and he’s been attacking me hard. He wants to do anything that he can to get in the way and to be completely honest, I have let him.
I have let him distract me with worldly, selfish desires. I have been complacent about my time spent with God. I have let doubt, fear and nerves grab ahold of my heart and make me question my choice to follow God to 11 new countries throughout the course of 11 months. The lesson that I have learned through all of that is that it’s okay. It’s okay to stumble and fall. It’s okay to have worldly desires. It’s okay to be worried or afraid- I am human. But God has placed the people and tools into my life to offer me a helping hand and to help me up when I stumble. In reality, I fall short of His grace on a daily basis but that does not mean that He has given up on me. It doesn’t mean that He wants me to stop fighting the good fight. It just means that I have to take the helping hand that is lifting me up off the ground, wipe the dust off and keep fighting for His Kingdom. I am called to put on the full armor of God and simply to stand (Ephesians 6:13).
It’s not easy and it absolutely never will be. But nowhere in the Bible will you find the words “Christianity is easy or simple”. However, I do find promises of eternity with my Heavenly Father and that is enough for me to keep fighting for.
This journey can be discouraging, frustrating and disheartening. But it is pushing my faith in His provision to a whole new level, and I cannot wait to see where my journey takes me. Just because I sometimes disagree with God’s timing doesn’t mean that He doesn’t have a plan.
