If you haven’t read my last couple of blogs, please head over to The Importance of Community: When Your Hands Are Tied Behind Your Back, True Healing: What Do You Do With Shattered Glass, and A Glimpse of Hope: Breathing Out Life to catch up on a few things that have been going on these past couple of months.
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One of the first miracles in the New Testament in when Jesus turns water into wine. At this moment, a yielding happened. He wasn’t necessarily ready to be made known by others in what miracles He could do, but the time was there. He gave up His will at that time to do what the Father had put in front of Him. In an essence, He yielded Himself to the Father to grow more into who He was going to become.
In my life, this has looked like hard conversations, death of loved ones, moments of insecurity that caused decisions to be skewed, and so many other things. We should want to be yielded to whatever the Holy Spirit has for us, but a lot of the times it causes us to question if we really are aligned in the same spirit as the Lord.
When we choose to be yielded, the Lord is able to make little miracles happen in us. You see, we have 2 choices really that I can see. We can: A) choose to live unyielding to the Spirit and do what we want, or B) we can yield to the work the Lord is doing. When we choose option A, we become bitter, sour, rancid; unable to be used by the Lord. But, when we choose option B, we allow the Lord to begin pruning us. We allow the process of dying to self happen. We allow the Lord to gather His fruit, and begin the process of making us into precious wine.
In John 15, it explains that we are nothing without the Father. He is the true vine, and we are the branches. The branches cannot thrive without the vine, and the vine won’t thrive without living water flowing through it. But this leads me to the question, what type of branch do you see yourself as? Are you a grapevine with flowers budding every where and your fruits bearing in all seasons, or a cactus where thorns prevent others from being able to approach your flowers?
Both of these plants have different dependence on their source of hydration, or Living Water. A cactus by no means is “thriving” from water, in fact, if they have too much water they drown. But a grapevine on the other hand needs water in order to bare any fruit. Which one do you resonate with the most? Because if I’m being honest, I’ve been a cactus for a while. Hardened and sharp on the outside by what has been thrown at me. Looking like I’m put together from far away, but when people get closer they see the little thorns I have. And Lord forbid they try to reach out to me or touch me, I’d start throwing spikes at them.
So I had to start making a choice, will I choose to live in this permanent state of anger and hatred, or will I choose to trust that the Lord is faithful. Will I surrender over what I think my life should look like, for what the Lord wants it to look like? That’s hard, because yielding isn’t our natural form of posture towards anyone. We, or maybe just me, don’t like to surrender or submit ourselves to someone else. It isn’t something that we practice often as adults. I can always remember my parents saying to respect your elders, or honor your elders, but never SUBMIT to your elders. Why then is this so hard for us?
Pride. Pride is the root of a lot of my stubbornness. The reason why I don’t want to admit I may need help. The reason why I get mad when someone tells me I’m wrong, or when they prove what I said is incorrect. No one likes to be wrong, and no one really likes being “told” what to do. But these are all lies that our flesh has placed in us that we have believed. How do we combat these lies? By serving one another. By posturing our hearts in a stance of surrender to let others use our situations as stepping stones, learning blocks, and catalyst.
This looks like sharing stories, the good, the bad, the hard and the ugly. It’s saying, I don’t know why this happened, but this is what I’m learning from it. It’s sitting down and saying that you don’t know exactly what someone is going through, but I can sit here with you and cry, and then be here when we both walk out of the darkness together. It’s being a friend, and choosing to love people even when you don’t understand completely.
This past week I learned about how Jesus responded in a hard time in the Bible when one of his good friends, Lazarus, had passed away. He showed up to the town and was greeted by Mary and Martha. Mary and Martha were mourning and exclaimed that if Jesus had only been there a little sooner, their brother wouldn’t have died. As they were weeping, Jesus wept as well. Jesus went through hard things just as you and I do. But the thing that is interesting to me is that while he did mourn, he did not stay there. After he mourned WITH Mary and Martha, he went out and made a difference in the lives of those who were mourning.
We can choose to be affected by the things around us, either positively or negatively. We can allow them to paralyze us, or be used as a catalyst. For me, it was easy to get stuck in a mindset that I was alone and that the Lord forgot about me. But, you see, the Lord never forgets about us. He is right next to you the entire time, and He is rooting for you to make it out of the darkness. I pray that this week you feel an overwhelming sense of the Lord and that He would reveal more of Himself in you.
