December 10

I thin God is trying to prove a point to me in a way that He often does. Generally when I know He is trying to tell me something, the first time He says it, I think "alright yeah, I've got it" and His response is always, accurately, "no, you clearly don't, so let's go over it again". I'm like a poor student who thinks they can handle the lessons better than they really do. So, after yesterday finding what I wrote last year about coming back to see God's faithfulness, I was looking aimlessly through the files on my computer and I came across something that I wrote over two years ago about a moment of moving back towards the Lord. So, same as yesterday, here is what I wrote two years ago:

"December 10, 2013

Recently, as simply part of my life, I have had a feeling in the back of my head of myself moving away from God. Every time this happens (and I feel it is way too frequently) my first reaction is that God is pulling away from me, when I know that actually God is chasing after with all of His might, and that to get away from the effects of His love, I must be running hard in the opposite direction.

I always miss the beginning of this, I never notice myself starting to move away from God, but instead I find myself mid-stride, halfway through an attempt to runaway like a child who didn’t get the toy she wanted. I’ll find my Bible gathering dust in a bag from the last trip I took it on, and I’ll notice that last date in my journal is one from months ago, or I’ll realize that I cannot find one of the aforementioned necessities, or that I don’t remember where a book or a verse can be found (not to say that you have to know every book of the Bible in order or that if you don’t know the exact reference of every verse, but I have found that when you truly fall in love with God’s word, and you are really reading it, you just tend to know where to find things).

Usually, just noticing that I am drifting isn’t enough to get me back into reading my Bible everyday and really listening to what God has to say to me. Usually (and I really hate that this happens often enough that I can even use the word “usually”), it takes a good hard push from my Creator to remind me that His love for me is not just something that I can remain “just ok” with, that it is something so powerful that I should not be able to help but act upon it.

This time around, my “shove” was a reminder of the journey of a friend of mine, and how much God’s love really, truly, actually changed her life. I have known this girl for almost three years now, and she is a fantastic person, now when I met her, I probably wouldn’t have said that about her, in fact, her closest friend at the time’s mom was actually worried about her daughter hanging out with this girl, and was only allowing it because she was bringing her to church. Then, she wasn’t what you would call a “good person”, and she certainly wasn’t a “church girl”, and according to people who have known her longer that me, that was her getting better. But over the first year that I knew her, I literally watched her life transform into the person I know today.

Two weeks ago, I asked her about a locket she was wearing; inside of it was a single word, “furious”. Two years ago, that word would have meant to live life furiously, to take it by the horns and have as much fun, and be as cool, and be as crazy as possible, but now, that word has a totally different meaning to her. She showed me an entry in her journal about it. It was a brief overview of her journey from her former life to her current one as a child of God. She talked about how God had furiously fought for her in so many situations in her life, how He had given her parents the courage to love her and care for her and to be the parents that’s she needed, how He had kept her from places and people that would have damaged her life irrevocably, and how He had always kept her in a place where there was a way out. There is a song that describes God’s love in a way that is a little different than what we normally think, “His love is deep, His love is wide, and it covers us, His love is FIERCE, His love is STRONG, and it is FURIOUS.” C.S Lewis described it perfectly: as a lion. It’s not something tame and captious, it is a furious fight for us against the one who wants us dead.

With the reminder of this I can’t keep living like I have been, I like the way it is described in the Afters’s song: “I feel alive, and it hurts for a change. I’m looking back, and it’s hard to believe that I was cool with the days that I wasted complacent, and tasteless, and bored. But that was yesterday; I’m never going back to easy. I’m never going back to the way it was. I’m never going back to ok.” I don’t think I can continue in living my life in a state of being “ok”, it just won’t do, because my God has fought and is fighting for me furiously, and that is not something that I can leave unnoticed.

His love is deep, His love is wide

And it covers us

His love is fierce, His love is strong

It is furious

His love is deep, His love is wide

And it’s waking hearts to life

He is jealous for me

Love’s like a hurricane I am a tree

Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy

And all of the sudden, I am unaware

Of these afflictions eclipsed by glory

And I realize just how beautiful You are

And how great Your affections are for me

I DON’T HAVE TIME TO MAINTAIN THESE REGRETS WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE WAY THAT HE LOVES US."