Exodus 11:10
…the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the people of Israel go out of his land.
Man! I don’t understand why the Lord keeps hardening Pharaoh’s heart time and time again. So many plagues! It seems like this is also a lesson for Moses. Building his trust and faithfulness to the Lord. How often does He ask us to do something and when it doesn’t have a result as we expected, we easily question the Lord and even our ability to hear Him?! We pray for that person or witness them repenting and they turn right back to their sin. We give them $20 for their “flat tire” and they drive in the opposite direction than they said they were headed. You share vulnerably with them and they spit in your face.
We have to trust that only God can see the big picture! He only gives us one piece of the puzzle at a time. What we do with that piece and the posture of our heart can tell us so much about ourselves! Do we do as instructed regardless of the outcome or do we move forward in faith that there is more purpose than we can see?
I learned this principle throughout this year. I began very guarded. “Okay, I’m only here for a few weeks. I will love these people but not 100% because I have to leave and so I can’t make much difference!”
This was the posture of my heart in the first several months off and on. Little did I know that the Lord was teaching me to trust Him. To love every single person as if it was my only day with them. To love with no conditions, as He does. He helped me to understand that I am a futuristic thinker. It doesn’t take long to see and hear that I think and dream about the future often. However, I was misusing that gift by projecting it onto relationships with people. Every person I met would trigger the question in my mind, “How long will I know them?” I lived in fear that no one I met would stay in my life long enough to be worth building a deep relationship. The problem is that I was using up so much energy just to hold back love in an attempt to self-preserve. I have experienced completely opening up to people and being misused or taken advantage of. So I told myself at some point, “You are too kind. You give too much. People take advantage of you and you can’t be a doormat.”
In the Philippines, I can see this so clearly. I refused to open up enough for the street boys at camp to be able to hurt me. By the second camp, I loved them without holding back. When we took them back to the streets and they scattered, I physically felt like someone had pulled my heart out of my chest and ripped it to shreds. I cried and screamed inside myself, telling God that it hurt too much! After that, I put my guards back up. Fast forward to Malawi. My team was in a good place and allowed me to slowly begin to let my guard down and be myself. This only grew stronger as the months rolled by. Now I am home and although I am not perfect, I realize that I cannot control people or relationships. All I can do is love people and live in the moment with them. You see, when our gifts are misdirected, they are destructive to our hearts and minds.
When I use my futuristic mind in relationships, I set myself up for a lot of disappointment. When we love people with everything in us, it doesn’t mean that we will never feel pain. Oh contrare, we will feel all the more pain! But God is the only One who can comfort us and truly remove the pain! I have to run to Him first! I cannot preserve myself from pain because in holding back and building resentment when people fall short of my expectations, I will experience even more pain! Funny how that works, huh? When we focus all of our energy toward not being something, we inadvertently become it! It may not manifest in the same manner we avoided, but we will still experience the same brokenness.
So trust that the piece of the puzzle you have been given has a divine and specific purpose! Don’t try to figure out the big picture because the hunt will exhaust you and tear away at your joy.
“Life is an echo. What you send will come back. What you sow, you will reap. What you give, you will get. What you see in others exists in YOU. So try not to judge, even those who will judge you. Give out all the love you can and let your love shine through.” – Zig Ziglar
