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."

March 14

Three hours ago, I sat down on my bed with the intention of writing a post about how I had felt so lost and distant before this past weekend and how being at Passion had completely changed my point of view and that I am totally on the right track now, but as I was typing I started to realize that that was simply not true. After convincing myself all weekend that things would be better when I got home and that I would feel sure and secure once it was all over, "sure" is the least accurate word that I can think of to describe how I felt. Broken, lost, unsteady, trembling (literally), and silent crying on my knees on the floor is a much better description. And this is how I really felt all weekend:

I find myself, once again, arriving to my knees,
I ask, I knock, I seek, I search for Your sweet relief.
Lord, I come confessing now, I've trained some wandering feet.
I've tasted and seen, but with faded feeling, I long for something sweet.
I feel it all, I know it's real when outward I am shouting,
But all the while, I move along, and inward I am doubting.
Never of Your greatness Lord, or Your reality,
But always of my own fate in this sinful malady.
I reach, I long, I pine, I thirst for some tender clarity,
And yet still, I find myself wading in this vast disparity.

I texted a friend who agreed to meet with me, and scrambled to grab my phone and wallet and tissues before I ran out the door to talk things through. A few hours later I arrived back at home to find that in my scramble to find what I needed, I had pulled out a booklet from an event that I went to last March. The event had fallen on the day that I made my absolutely decision about where I was going to go to college. I began looking through the booklet and found something that I had written just a few hours after my decision. I had intended to post what I wrote that night, but in the excitement of becoming a Gamecock, I left the pages unshared, so here tonight as I falter with doubt and worry, I'm going to finally post what I wrote that joyful afternoon.

"March 14, 2015

It is so very strange to me just how much has changed during this time. The difference between this morning and that morning three months ago is unreal. Three months ago if you had asked me where I was going to college, I would have told you "The Georgia Institute of Technology" not, "I hope that's where I get in" but "that is where I am going". And then, at 12:00 pm on January 10, 2015, everything changed. The news of being deferred was far more devastating than it ever should have been. But then I got to spend three months waiting on God. Have you heard the song that says "strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord"? I never really understood just how true that was until this. Spending time waiting on God forces you to listen to Him constantly, you feel like you have to be constantly connected to Him so that you don't miss His answer. And He keeps you waiting so that He can teach you things while He has your attention. Some of the things I learned through this time:
1. Those pseudo sins that you think aren't a big deal because it's all just in your head are still sin. There is no difference to God if you are having hateful thoughts about someone or actually physically harming them.
2. Listen. Just listen. It is so easy to just talk and talk and talk and talk, but if you are really looking to hear from God, you won't be able to hear when He wants to say something. So listen to Him when you're alone, listen to church leaders when you're with them, and listen to your parents when you're with them. God is trying to speak to you, so stop talking and listen.
3. Read your Bible. Good grief. Stop making excuses about being too tired and having too much to do. You don't have too much to do, you are wasting your time on insignificant things if they are getting in the way of your time in the Word. The difference in my perception of my day if I begin it in the Word versus if I don't, is astounding. Because, when you begin your day in scripture, you see each day as a new way to glorify Him, rather than a way to help yourself.
4. Oh how He loves us. He is obsessed with us. He created us exactly how He wants us to be. But the thing is, He also feels that way about the person that you hate. That person is just as much His creation as you are, and when you hurt them, you are hurting Him. "


This was written by a me that had just come out of the dark days of worry, and was beginning to see the light of God's promises. She had moved from "Lord I am holding onto Your promises, because I know that that is the only way I am going to get through this" to "Lord I am holding onto Your promises because I KNOW that You are faithful, because I've seen it". That girl is not me right now. Me right now is back in the darkness and back to my knees, but I'm still getting truth from the Lord, He is just using this nearly year old booklet to do it. What I thought I wanted out of Passion this year was for God to say "alright, I am with you now, and everything is going to be ok" instead He waited until after Passion when I was finally willing to admit that my way may not be the best way to say "look I am with you always, and you know that because I've told you before".
None of this changes the way that I feel, but the way that I feel doesn't change God.



Post Script (May 13, 2016): just a note about #1 in the things that I had learned from God while waiting to hear from Him, I didn't deal with that pseudo sin the way that I should have and it has lead to real tangible sin in my life and I wish that I could go back to me a year ago and tell her that even though she thinks that she is a good person and doesn't have to deal with temptation the way that other people do, she does, cause she and I are broken and I wish that I had acknowledged the fact that I am broken earlier, because I would have lead to less pain and less tough conversations now.

Wandering in the Desert

I am so much like the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. Like them I come to the Lord on my knees saying 'I've messed it up, can you fix it for me?' and, ever so faithfully, He does. He pours out His mercy and His love and says 'Do better this time', my reply always comes 'This time, Lord, I am going to get it right'. And I do. For a time. I seek Him and I really do want to know and participate in His plan for my life. But then nothing happens. It's not that God stops His work in me or that He abandons me at all, but the pace gets too slow for my taste, and I begin to move into a very purposeless way of life. It's never that I specifically begin doing any 'big sin', but I stop making a point of doing things for the Lord and I settle into my comfortable routine of school, friends, netflix, and sleep. There is nothing wrong with any of those things, but they shouldn't be my entire life. There is so much more for me. And I know it. Even sloshing through that routine, I know it. Something always seems to happen near the end of the calendar year the jolts me out of this slump. (Yes, my Israel inspired cycle of faithfulness is consistent enough that I know when things are coming.) and then I crawl back to the scarred feet of Christ and I say 'I've messed it up, can you fix it for me?' and, ever so faithfully, He does.
I watched this cycle happen again this year as it has just about every year since I first decided to follow Christ. The final few weeks of the semester, I started to look at my life at school, it was fine, but fine wasn't what I had come for. At my first experience at a passion conference this time last year, I had said 'Lord, whatever school I end up at, I know that you put me there, and you put me there for a purpose.' I should have gone to school expectant of what the Lord had in store, but instead I went expectant of what I had in store. And at the time, what I had in store was simple and comfortable and nice, and I liked it. But as finals drew near and I called to mind this yearly cycle that I go through, I thought, 'oh no, what is going to happen this time?' and then, nothing happened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. And nothing happened. Things weren't just not going wrong either, they were going right, with everything that I expected to be the thing that brought me to my knees, were actually lifting me up in the way that I was living. BUT I began to look back on the semester that I had, and I thought about the prayer that I had prayed at the beginning of 2015 and realized that I was not doing much toward the plan that I had thought God had had for me at USC. I began to doubt if I had really made the right decision, did God actually want me somewhere else? Had I messed up His plan by choosing the wrong school? And with those doubts came more doubts. What if I'm not really doing enough or the right things to be a Christian. I had a plan for my answer to this question later in this post, and I felt like I knew the answer, but typing it now, I realize that I have spent my entire afternoon since I've gotten home from Passion worried about this very thing, 'I need to be in scripture enough and I need to be listening to only worship music and watching more videos of sermons' and the tears begin to roll because I know just how untrue that is. I feel like every time God is trying to tell me something, I hear it the first time and I say 'Yeah, God, I've got it, you don't have to keep pressing this point' and He replies, 'well, you clearly still just don't get it, so I'm going to keep on driving it home until it actually clicks'. After spending a whole weekend listening to God say 'stop worrying about you doing enough to have your name written in the book of life, you made a choice and your name is in there permanently and you doing all of this is not making a difference, it is done.' and still I come home and think 'If i just try harder'.