“I have wandered away like a lost sheep;
come and find me, for I have not forgotten your commands.” (Psalm 119:176; NLT)
Hang around me a bit
and you’ll surely hear me say something like, “Life can’t all happen on the
mountaintop; growth happens in the valleys; if life was a plateau then it would
be boring.” I’m a firm believer that I cannot know light without darkness just
as I cannot know who I am unless I experience who I am not. By this belief, I
must go through periods of time where I am not the person I want to be in order
to know both who I want to be and who I AM.
Many people often
refer to similar experience as desert times or being in the wilderness. It is
time that I feel more distant from God, it is harder to hear him, and I feel a
little lost. When I am in that place, it seems like no matter how much I think
I should know the answers or what I should do to bring myself out of it,
nothing works.
It’s beyond
frustrating.
More often than not,
though, what I find is that God patiently waits through my stubbornness for the
moment of beautiful surrender when I throw my hands up and say, “God, I don’t
have the answers, I don’t know what to do, I’m giving it to you. Please show me
the way.”
I get self-confident
when things go well. While self-confidence can be a good thing, it gets
troublesome when I start to think I have the answers and attempt to take my life back under my own direction and management. What I need more than self-confidence is God-confidence.1
A couple of years
ago, a chance encounter with an out-of-town visitor led to conversation over
coffee. The discussion primarily revolved around God even though she was not a
believer. She met me with opposition at every turn until finally she voiced
what bothered her most about our dialogue. With her voice agitated and
slightly raised, she blurted out, “You can’t just totally let go and let God.
The idea of total surrender is absurd. It can’t be done!” As I let her words
settle in the air between us, a smile crept across my face as I calmly said,
“Actually, it can. It was the best thing I ever did. It saved my life.”
Then things got good
and even though I was thanking and praising God at every turn, I began to
forget I needed to continue surrendering to him.
This is a cycle of my
life. There is no better indicator that I’ve tried to take over than
when things start to feel like they are getting out of control. If I find
myself worrying, I’m probably not surrendering. I’ve wandered away. God is
there, I know he’s there, but I’ve wandered over to the edge of the pasture, or
perhaps just outside the gate, or, if I’m being really stubborn, well past the
gate and off into the forest.
Knowing my mistake, I
turn my face upward and admit what I’ve done. Then I ask for help. “I’ve
wandered away. Please come find me.”
God wants me to
completely rely on him. He wants me to trust him implicitly. Sometimes that
means he’s going to let me make mistakes until I consciously recognize and
admit what I’ve done and then earnestly seek his passionate love and care.
My prayer today is that
I find where I’m trying to direct my life and then let it go. God’s got
this.
Amen! =D
1
“Forget about self-confidence; it’s useless. Cultivate God-confidence.” (1
Corinthians 10:12; MSG)
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