Stripping Away Me

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? – Mark 8:35-36

I prayed a bold prayer.

I asked God to strip me of me and fill me with Him.

I didn’t realize it would hurt this much.

I’m prideful and independent and stubborn and selfish and I don’t like losing. Especially when what I’m losing is myself. And as I shed the layers of myself, I don’t like seeing the ugliness that my heart is capable of producing.

All at once, a ministry that I have poured my time and my heart into felt like it was collapsing under my feet.

A well-intentioned request for input from a friend felt like a threat to the “safety bubble” I have strategically placed myself within.

All the while, dealing with so many uncertainties in my near and distant future.

Will God provide us with a home, where my kids can have their own space, but which won’t put me in a financial bind?

With my vehicle, my washing machine, and my computer all seemingly near death, will I be slammed with the expenses of having to replace all of them at the same time?

Am I being faithful and obedient, and am I really where God wants me as I begin a new semester in ministry?

Will the Steelers win the Super Bowl?

(Ok, so I guess the answer to that last one isn’t so uncertain… there’s always next season…)

With each unanswered question comes a follow-up question:

Regardless of how the answer plays out, do I trust that God will provide?

He promises He will. But it’s according to the riches of HIS glory – not mine.

And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of His glory in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 4:19

With my ministry, when things seem to be unraveling, I start to feel responsible. I feel like a failure. I feel inadequate. I feel rejected – both by people and by God. I feel incapable. And sometimes, I feel like giving up.

With my “safety bubble” being pressed upon, I feel the potential for it to pop – leaving me exposed and vulnerable in front of people I don’t know well enough to trust. I feel like my relationships inside the bubble are being threatened. I feel like retreating into a self-imposed solitary confinement as a means of protecting myself from whatever I sense is threatening my security.

In both scenarios, God has something to show me. I continue to look too much toward myself, and not enough toward Him.

I find myself using words like “me”… “my”… “I”… “I”… “I”…

When I should be saying “You”… “Your”… and each of my “I”s  should be followed by a “surrender”.

And He reminds me that He’s not doing anything I haven’t asked Him to do. He’s stripping away the layers of me so that I can clothe myself in layers of Him. And as painful as it is some days to be stripped down and ripped apart, in the end, the glory of His righteousness will shine through my life more brightly than any layer of myself ever could.

And as I allow Him to do His work in me, I hold tightly to the promise and the pronouncement of 1 Peter 5:10-11:

And the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. To HIM be the power forever and ever.

Chasing Desires in God's Timing

There is a time for everything

and a season for every activity under the heavens

(Ecclesiastes 3:1)

Sometimes God plants dreams in our hearts. Desires that He has for us, which, when sought after in the appropriate time, allow us to follow a path He has laid out for us. But sometimes this can be trickier than it might seem.

First, we must be sensitive to the Spirit moving in our hearts. We must be able to discern whether the desires are truly from Him. So how do we know if they’re truly from Him? We must seek Him first and foremost, above all other things. We must spend time with Him. Enjoy Him. When our focus is on Him rather than ourselves, and our intention is to live our life for Him rather than for ourselves, He promises to shape our hearts’ desires.

Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.

(Psalm 37:4)

The next part, however, has proven even more challenging for me. Not only do we need to be sensitive to God’s Spirit shaping our desires, but we must also be aware of God’s ability to time things just perfectly. Sometimes God puts certain desires on our hearts to prepare us for a time in the future when He intends for us to act on those desires. To begin to move us toward a position where we will be better equipped to act on those desires.

  

The bible is full of testimonies that point to the perfect timing of God. Examples of promises made by God to people who were then asked to wait. Wait and trust. Trust that when the time was right, God would initiate the move.

God has blessed me with a heart full of desires. He’s given me big dreams, big ideas, big plans, big goals… and the personality to want to chase after every single one of them all at once. Even recklessly. And for a long time, I spent a lot of my energy doing just that. And let me tell you, I can be good at it. I’m determined, and I don’t give up easily.

But as I found myself dragging my kids to every ministry opportunity I could get myself signed up for, and then beginning to resent the fact that they made it difficult for me to be so involved, God began showing me something I hadn’t expected.

He really didn’t want me involved in everything.

But He did want my attention.

Because He had blessed me with one of the greatest ministries any person can be given – the ministry of shaping the hearts of my children. And then He reminded me of a sobering reality that, while this may well be one of the most important ministries of my lifetime, it may also be one of the shortest ministry seasons I ever have. My children’s childhood will be over before I know it. They will only be children for a season. Every other ministry opportunity will still be there when my children are grown. But their childhood will be gone.

God has placed many desires on my heart, but I cannot do His kingdom justice by chasing after them outside of His perfect timing. Those things He has placed on my heart for a time in the future, are the very things He is training me for and preparing me for in the present.

And what better training ground than the exhausting, messy, chaotic, disorganized, everyday life of a single mom?