Can we only speak when we are fully living what we are saying? If all our words had to cover all our actions, we would be doomed to permanent silence! Sometimes we are called to proclaim God’s love even when we are not yet fully able to live it. Does that mean we are hypocrites? Only when our own words no longer call us to conversion. Nobody completely lives up to his or her own ideals and visions. But by proclaiming our ideals and visions with great conviction and great humility, we may gradually grow into the truth we speak. As long as we know that our lives always will speak louder than our words, we can trust that our words will remain humble.
Each new step in life is also a leaving, a surrendering of an old reality to move into a new one.
Be grateful for the love that surrounds you, and for the opportunities you have to love. Be mindful of your place in this world, and your connection to people you care about. Never doubt that you are loved, though those who love you may be far away. Spend your love recklessly; it will never be wasted. It is the spending, not the result, that enriches us.
Pay attention to the moment that you’re in. It will pass. It is a transition, not a final destination. Love in this moment. Receive what this moment offers you. Be lovingly attentive to what is, in the present moment. What comes next is full of promise, not the least of which is this: that there will always be more love. Trust this, and let God’s delight fill you.
In this day of ‘instant’ everything, the practice, and importance, of patience is ignored…a lot. Ok, I can understand why – it’s HARD! haha Our natural inclination is to want-what-we-want and then go and get it, or do it. Yet patience and waiting are extremely important and valuable in life, and with learning to trust God.
Growing our faith depends on our ability to wait on listening, and waiting, for the voice of God. Not and easy task, but, oh so worth it!
I have learned a lot of patience over the years. God has blessed me with many lessons in waiting, and developing, my patience. I do not feel like I have gained ‘virtue’ status – ha – maybe I never will. It is a challenge for me each and every time. Yet I know the value, I trust God’s timing over my own impulse and I am willing to keep attempting to wait gracefully each time I am called to do so.
I no longer want to live my life my own way. I know God has much better plans for me than I can accomplish on my own – and so, once again I am at a moment of waiting. The pause. The void. The hope. The risk. The possible disappointment. The struggle to walk in peace. The letting go. The constant prayer communication to allow me to let whatever happens be right.
It’s a balancing, see saw, circus act for me – I go up – I go down – and I give thanks for the process as it is teaching me and growing my faith in this amazing God who has been so faithful to me and brought me right here, to where I should be, on this path of grace.
For a girl like me it is nothing less than amazing, incredible, awe-inspiring! and it fuels my passion to keep growing, letting go further and further as I am consumed by the unfathomable love that gives me all good things! I was just blessed to read the book Flirting With Faith by Joan Ball. It encouraged me so much at this particular moment. I highly recommend it.
All I can do is fall on my face in gratitude and gladly give up….myself…my wants…my life…my all.
Yes, the waiting is the hardest part in some ways – yet also the most important and the most blessed as well. The valley is where you become intimate and learn to trust. Nothing can take its place and no one can take that from you. I know – I’ve been there! I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It is my truth – in my times of patience I have seen the face, and heard the voice, of God.
The Waiting
by Tom Petty
Oh baby don’t it feel like heaven right now
Don’t it feel like something from a dream
Yeah I’ve never known nothing quite like this
Don’t it feel like tonight might never be again
We know better than to try and pretend
Baby no one coulda ever told me ’bout this
I said yeah yeah
The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
Well yeah I might have chased a couple women around
All it ever got me was down
Then there were those that made me feel good
But never as good as I’m feeling right now
Baby you’re the only one that’s ever known how
To make me wanna live like I wanna live now
I said yeah yeah
The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you get one more yard
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
Oh don’t let it kill you baby, don’t let it get to you
Don’t let it kill you baby, don’t let it get to you
I’ll be your bleedin’ heart, I’ll be your cryin’ fool
Don’t let this go too far
Ann Voskamp’s words from yesterday’s blog strike me to the bone –
There is nothing safe about the Christ who rent the veins and the veil to save us — He is Divine and He is Dangerous and He is Detonating. He is no tame lion.
What did Randy Alcorn say and in the most Scriptural sense? “It’s dangerous faith in our untamed Savior that leads us to the joy we crave.”
And there is so much we don’t understand though we steep ourselves in the infallible Word, that can’t be domesticated and entirely deduced by finite minds in a world where He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing.
You can only be marked as safe if you’ve fashioned for yourself a God small and tame.
And what the world desperately needs is more dangerous disciples of an unsafe God.
John Piper had said it like that:
“I think it is virtually impossible to honestly say that knowing God, as God intends to be known by his people in the new covenant, simply means mental awareness or understanding or acquaintance with God. Not in a million years is that what “knowing God” means here. This is the knowing of a lover, not a scholar. A scholar can be a lover. But a scholar—or a pastor—doesn’t know God until he is a lover. You can know about God by research; but until the researcher is ravished by what he sees, he doesn’t know God for who he really is. And that is one great reason why many pastors can become so impure. They don’t know God—the true, massive, glorious, gracious, biblical God. The humble intimacy and brokenhearted ecstasy—giving fire to the facts—is not there.” – John Piper
Until we’re ravished by what we see, we don’t really know who God is? Ravished? It sounds so — terribly uncomfortable and wholly dangerous.
But maybe that is the thing? Does God ever make His people comfortable and hasn’t He always called His disciples to the dangerous? To say the uncomfortable, to speak to an inappropriately erotic culture with purely redemptive language, to take back the language that’s been hijacked and tainted by a fallen and direly needful culture and use it to speak of His own startling, ravishing, holy metaphor….
The heart recovers as it keeps walking dangerously ahead.
A heart recovers as it embraces the inherent risks of living. God met Moses on a mountaintop. Who ever said climbing mountains was safe? Where are those who are willing to be dangerous disciples of the unsafe God who is the safest of all?
And a heart recovering, beating strong and stronger –
It can sound as loud and dangerous as thunder in the desert, a resounding pounding for a straight pathway for the God who shatters the skies wide open with all His wild truth…
With all His holy, unmanageable love that scours the dirty brave right clean.
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.
– Jim Morrison
life: acoustic & amplified 