I have realized that I often use this blog for one of two things:
1) To keep my readers updated in my process of support raising and preparing for the World Race
2) To write down some of the things that the Lord has been teaching me daily as I trust Him with this new chapter of my life
However, I have yet to use this blog to ask for prayer. Well…today that is changing. I need your prayers. One week from today I will be leaving Texas to head out to Georgia for a week-long training camp for the World Race. I have been expecting all along that camp will be a time that the Lord just rips into me spiritually, breaking down every facet of my life until He has it all…
I just didn’t expect that He was going to start this process a week early.
God is radically wrecking my life right now, in every single aspect. I am being shaken up, turned upside down, tossed back in forth in His efforts to show me that He will not rest, will not be satisfied, until He has all of me. But, Satan knows this, and he is doing everything in his power to use this time of breaking down to convince me that God does not know what He is doing, that I am useless in the Kingdom work God has called me towards, that my daily failures and inadequacies make me a hypocrite in light of what I am trying to do with my life in the next year.
Through the help of Scripture, friends, and an excellent book by C.S. Lewis, I am doing my best to battle these lies. But I need your help. Pray for me as I try to face these next 2 weeks with courage. Pray that I will have wisdom to distinguish the truths of God from the lies of Satan. Pray that I will have the strength to endure as God strips me of any notion that I have control over where He takes my life or what He wants me to become. Pray that I can forgive in situations that I need to forgive, hold my tongue in situations that I need to be silent, let go of people and expectations in order for freedom to enter. Pray that I will have the humility to submit to whatever trials the Lord brings my way, so that through these trials my heart and eyes may be opened to the goodness of God and the urgency of this Kingdom work He is preparing me to do.
In the meantime, check out this portion of Mere Christianity that I have been pouring over today. I know it’s long, but I feel like it sums up exactly what I, and many other believers, have experienced in this journey of faith:
“…Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like a dentist. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of or which is obviously spoiling daily life. Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.
That is why He warned people to ‘count the cost’ before becoming Christians. ‘Make no mistake; He says, ‘if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect–until my Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as He said He was well pleased with me. This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less.’
And yet – this is the other and equally important side of it – this Helper who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make to-morrow to do the simplest duty. As a great Christian writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, every father is pleased at the baby’s first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way, he said, ‘God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.’ ….
Of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into. But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us. He is the inventor, we are only the machine. He is the painter, we are only the picture. How should we know what He means us to be like? You see, He has already made us something very different from what we were. Long ago, before we were born, when we were inside our mothers’ bodies, we passed through various stages. We were once rather like vegetables, and once rather like fish: it was only at a later stage that we became like human babies. And if we had been conscious at those earlier stages, I daresay we should have been quite contented to stay as vegetables or fish – should not have wanted to be made into babies. But all the time He knew His plan for us and was determined to carry it out. Something the same is now happening at a higher level. We may be content to remain what we call `ordinary people’: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility; it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience.
That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected), he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along – illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation – he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.
I find I must borrow yet another parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurt abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of–throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him – for we can prevent Him, if we choose – He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”
