It Was Supposed to be Beautiful

I find myself wanting to throw out my dreams. Drop them on the side of the road and leave them there never to return. Is this really what going after dreams looks like...?
We want people to stand up and do the right things but we ourselves won't do it and when faced with it, it's just too hard.



Jesus came to do a very hard thing and look how they treated Him. The things the said about Him. If I was one of the prophets of the Old Testament laying on my side naked what would you say about me? Hannah cried out to the Lord for her womb to be opened up to have a child and Eli called her drunk.

We need to change the narrative not the objection. We still need to go after the dreams the Lord has said to go after. But what it looks like, well we've got that all wrong.

As Christians, as a society we go after the symptom not the root. We do it in the medical world, with guns, with child molestation, with abortion, with orphans, with foster care, with families, with learning etc... I could go on.

We constantly look for the way out instead of the way through.



I could quite literally list a million examples of this but I'll use this story to illustrate my point.

I am teaching my 2-4 year old how to swim. They are so scared about drowning that they don't like me teaching them to swim. They cry, they resist me on the subject with all their being. The way around is to say "well they aren't ready, they don't want to learn, they are to scared so I'll wait till they want to and then I'll teach them, it's just to scary for them right now." Or I could do the right thing as a parent, being that it's my job as a loving parent, and I could say I am sorry that you are afraid and are crying but I love you enough to teach you how to over come this fear, face it, and learn to swim.

So the next time we are having a family get together at the pool and for that one second that I look away and my child slips silently into the water and they are over come with fear, fear does not win because we didn't let it win, they now have the tools and power to over come fear with the knowledge of experience and the knowledge of knowing how to swim.

This is what a loving parent does. We don't see this much these days so when the Father does it with us we are like that 2-4 year old resisting. Why does walking out this dream look like this, feel like this?! Why does it feel like no good deed goes unpunished? Where are you Father?

My daughter thinks, in the moment, maybe that I am just being mean and trying to torture her?! But what I know and she does not is that fear literally paralyzes you and all your limbs freeze up. You can't swim that way. Making our kids face their fears instead of giving into them helps their brains to react more clearly in times of crisis than letting fear take control. Perhaps this is the narrative we need to have with the Father. Surely His word is true. So surely going through the hell to see the other side will result in me swimming across the pool with out my floaty and if I fall in I won't drown.

Yes I feel like Hannah over here crying out contending with the Lord for my promise. The Eli's are calling me drunk, labeling that something is wrong and sinful in my life and that's why I am not seeing it. But Samuel had to come at the right time. The time he was meant to come for David, for Saul and all of Israel at that time. All of my dreams and all of my life are in the hands of The Lord.

We have to determine whether going after the things of the Lord and looking crazy doing it are more important than looking like we have it all together and everyone loving us.

It sounds easy when reading it here but I know that it is not. Peoples wrong judgments in all their ways, can sting and hurt and are not easy to live under. Non-the-less its a cost we must count and a daily decision we must come to.

Our love for Him and for the least of these will cost us our lives, but Jesus says that if we are willing to lose our lives we will find it.

So, I guess that will make me that crazy lady over here attempting to lose my life to find it.
And if you are on this crazy journey as well we can sharpen, encourage, and push one another when the going gets rough. 

Keep fighting to find the Lord in the things you are fighting for.

Next time you are going through that hard part of the journey don't think it's not beautiful. Beauty is not just the flower but all that had to happen for that flower to be there. The burial, the darkness, the breaking forth, the hot sun, the rain, and then the bursting forth of the petals that bring the seed to do it all over again.

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