For Those Who Wait

This is for those who wait

Another day, another waiting game

A little different but it’s still the same

I am here, but where’s the one I am longing for?

I’m having trouble feeling all alone

Will my heart never find a home?

I want to hope but sometimes I just don’t know

I know I’m not the only one

So we sing a lullaby to the lonely hearts tonight

Let it set your heart on fire, let it set you free

When you’re fighting to believe

In a love that you can’t see

Just know there is a purpose

For those who wait

I want to open up my eyes

I know that all I need is time

I’m growing stronger every single day

God, I’m going to lean into You now

Letting go of all my fear and doubt

I can’t do this on my own so I’ll give you control

I know I’m not the only one

The pressure makes us stronger

The struggle makes us hunger

The hard lessons make the difference

And the difference makes it worth it

-“For those who wait” by Fireflight

Once again, the messages God is leading me to just reinforce what He is already teaching me. Church this morning was just that. About how I have previously mentioned that feelings aren’t facts and I can’t keep continuing to let those emotions dictate how I react to life or how I set my path. I have been thinking a lot about God’s will for my life and those around me (which just “happens” to be the series being taught currently there). I have been aspiring to attain some spiritual growth which is the direction we are leading our small group into and of course, the exact same message is being taught there as in service and what I feel like God has already been placing in my heart. Do not be deceived; I am proof positive that if you seek after Christ, He’s going to answer back. Be prepared though, it isn’t going to be what you want but everything you need.

I once again am at a limbo period in my life. I have been trying hard to convince myself that life is one way and accepting it is the first way to surrender. And then last night, I learned some news that changes that game completely. I still can’t decide if that news is supposed to help or hinder me. Maybe it’s both.

I feel like I am stuck in a war, but it’s with myself. I mentioned yesterday that I am at a sort of crossroad. I find that I am the same person as before wanting the same things. But my heart is completely different. After standing in the face of beauty, you can’t ever go back to looking for fulfillment in the world of the shallow and meaningless. I don’t mean that to be mean, trust me I like the things of this world and want to be a part of it, but I know that I can never find my heart’s desire in anything of it. That scares the crap out of me. This world, this life is all I know. But it’s also not enough. A true encounter with Jesus changes everything.

This information I received has me more confused than ever. It helps me in the sense that it gives me the confidence of knowing that some of what I convince myself of by way of low self-esteem isn’t true. It hurts me because the news makes me just want to jump in the driver’s seat instead of turning over they keys of control of my life. It’s complicated and confusing (I’m sorry, I know it’s super confusing for any readers who don’t know what I am talking about, but I jut feel the need to keep this kind of vague to protect others).

The funny part of the situation is that I asked God for this. I asked Him to reveal one of two truths so that I could gain some peace about my situation. And as usual, just because you get what you want, doesn’t mean you will feel the way you thought you would when you get it. I think this may be God’s way of reminding me that no matter what I want, if I want to learn to fully surrender, that there will be times that I just have to continue to wait. Even when I get a glimpse of the finish line, it doesn’t mean He’s clearing me to sprint to the finish. The marathon is nowhere near the finish. Like I said before, this news makes me feel good about one situation, but it changes nothing. In fact, in some ways it just makes the waiting harder.

“Those hard times that happened to you can become the best things that ever happened to help yourself and to help others. And those will be the cornerstones of your entire life and the basis and the formation of your character.” (Dawn Michele from Fireflight about the above song, “For those who wait”). This whole time in my life is about building my character. I think God is currently taking a new tactic in my teaching now that I’m actually listening. I think He is trying to show me that getting what I want isn’t as fulfilling and peaceful as I expect. It doesn’t change anything; it just brings more for me to worry about.

Yancey (at my church Clear Creek Community Church) mentioned today how we imagine God’s will as this path that we have to fulfill specific behaviors to stay on. He mentioned how hard we make it for ourselves to try to maintain that path because as imperfect humans we don’t have the ability to do. We put insane amounts of pressure on ourselves to do so ourselves instead of looking to Christ for it. But I realized today, that it scares me a little to realize that isn’t how following God’s will works. The “path” makes things finite and theoretically attainable. No path seems even scarier than the unattainable one. (Do not be confused that I am saying God doesn’t have a plan or a will-He tells us He absolutely does, it’s just not found by following this alleged “path” to the right anything).

I got this strange feeling tonight as I was obsessively over analyzing EVERYTHING like I always do. I feel God telling me that He gave me a little of what I wanted, but to rest on everything else. I just got this feeling He’s telling me: “I got this, go back to what I told you to work on”. So, back to working on seeking Him, growing as a person & loving on the people He is putting in my path. You with me?

Silence is Golden (or so they say…)

Silence can be a scary thing. I am one of those people that is rarely ever in true silence. When I wake up, my phone is still playing the music I went to bed listening to, I let it play until I walk out my door, I turn on the radio once I get in my car, I put on my headphones while I am at work (when not talking to people or customers) and then when I get home, usually the tv goes on. The few moments I may spend in transition from one act to the other is miniscule and often happens while in the presence of other people talking. There is no silence. Often that is completely intentional- I don’t want to be in silence. For me silence=being alone. I think this point of view is a common feeling for our generation, emotionally and spiritually.

When the idea of silence is a scary thing, how do we cope when God is being painfully silent? By silent I don’t mean cruel, absent, or misleading. I mean when He is putting you in a place where He is not revealing any more information than what is absolutely necessary to get you by and keep you in place. This is what I am currently experiencing. Like a best kept secret, God is revealing to me only the things I absolutely have to know, most of which is don’t do any of the things I want to in this situation. You know, the kind of things that are fueled by stress, fear or pain: emotion-led actions. Things like burning bridges, being selfish with my time/family/resources, hurting others because I’m hurting. The only thing I feel God actively telling me are things about myself, Himself, and our relationship. Literally, nothing else.

This seems like a good place to stop and talk about the God I believe in. I am aware that many people may end up on this blog because they happen to know me or get redirected by the tags. If you are one of those people that end up here and don’t have a good understanding of God or why He may be silent in your life (or are wondering why He is silent at all), please know this is not God’s way of being cruel. The thing is, we are only able to see a narrow view of our lives and the impact our experiences have on our lives. Jim Cymbala in his book “Fresh Faith” (from the previously mentioned Perspectives book I am currently reading) says, “The hardest part of faith is often simply to wait. And the trouble is, if we don’t, then we start to fix the problem ourselves-and that makes it worse. We complicate the situation to the point where it takes God much longer to fix it than if we had quietly waited for His working in the first place.”

Imagine if God told you all His plans, gave you all the answers, revealed His secrets. How would you respond? I know what I would do…I would jump to action! I would start living & working differently. Who wouldn’t want to jump start the process of making your life better if you knew exactly what to do to get it and what the end result would be? But if that were to happen, where did God go in my jump? He disappeared, not because He left me, but because I no longer needed Him. There would no longer be a need for faith, mercy, or a chance to glorify Him. It would once again be all about me.

Sometimes God is silent because it forces us to stop and listen. He may become silent to silence us. He may become silent because right now, especially in a time of suffering, He wants me to focus on Him and our relationship before I can work on my future relationships with others. I guess if I am being truly honest with myself, God isn’t being that silent with me (look at the past 6 days of blogging based on what He is telling me), He’s just being silent about the areas I want answers. What a merciful God-because those are the areas I am not emotionally mature enough to deal with in this state anyway.

I remember a couple years ago (wow time has gone by so fast) when my sister was attempting to get pregnant with her first kid. She was going through some on-going medical issues and possibly facing the reality that her body would not or could not produce a baby. She and her husband struggled with what God wanted them to do, what steps they could possibly take with the medical advances available today. I remember her telling me that she was waiting for God to give her a “go-ahead” sign to take that next step (a financial one, a faith one, a physical one), just something that gave them the indication that was what God wanted them to do, a step they should make. And nothing, they heard nothing. God didn’t tell them to take a step, He didn’t tell them to stop wanting it, He just told them to wait. So they did. They just said we are going to wait. And the very next day she found out she was pregnant! After months of waiting, praying, suffering, & fearing the cost or potential inability to receive this gift, here it was.

The most exciting part (well other than being blessed with the cutest kid alive, seriously that’s not biased, it’s pure fact, haha) when they look at him, they see God. They see a relationship cultivated in trust and faith. That beautiful little boy serves as a daily reminder of the struggle they endured and the faithfulness of the Father who fulfills.

We live in a society filled with debt (hey I’m guilty of it too although I am about to plunge into fixing that). We, for the most part, don’t really identify with saving until we have the money to buy something. But this reminds me of a friend of mine I haven’t spoken to in years. The last time I had really seen her, she had just bought a new car. She had, I believe, just turned 30 and I think went in and paid it full or at least the majority of the note down. She had been driving this crappy old car around for years, it was super old and had no air conditioner. Do you think when she got that new car she just looked at it the way the rest of us do who finance? I’m gonna guess not. I bet every time she got in she remembered all the years of struggle fondly because they were now over. I bet she appreciated having air conditioning because she had suffered so long without it. I bet she found a sense of true accomplishment at putting in all that time & being a real owner of that new car.

That’s how it should be for us when we come out of our time of struggling. When we finally get what we have so longed for and waited for we should have that sense of belonging and appreciation. We should be able to look back at our struggles and see the relationship forged from them. When we look at the result of our struggle, we should see God because that blessing is a reminder that He may have been silent, we may have been asked to be still for a while, but He has always known what He was doing and the end result.

Like I said before, God is choosing to be silent to me about an area of my life. I am working really hard to be ok with that (trust me it has been a LONG road of questioning God about this and just being told WAIT). I’m starting to realize maybe I need to spend some time in the dark. Faith is really not my area of strength. It isn’t that I don’t believe, I just don’t know how to let that belief be what drives me, what sustains me. Right now my goal is to sharpen the gifts I do have and try to build up those that don’t come so easily to me. After all, that’s what this time of waiting & silence is truly about-a time for God to slowly mold me into the person I need to be for the next chapter of my life.

Do you feel like God is silent with you right now? Take a minute and ask yourself honestly why that might be. Can you see what He might be doing by trying to shield that part of your understanding? What are you able to see more clearly because of that? Be blessed.