March 1, 2011
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Between Me and God Again
Its such a wild feeling when God opens your eyes to something to which you have been so blind! I am asking myself today how I could have missed this?! It started last night when out of nowhere the Holy Spirit asked me a question. (The Holy Spirit talks y’all!) “Would anyone have ever been able to convince you to adopt a year ago?” “No”, I answered immediately. If someone had initiated the conversation, I would have said how awesome adoption is, and how I have a heart for the nations, and how I think that it might be something God calls us to in the future; but that would have been the end of it for me. I went from one day thinking adoption was just dandy to the next day knowing without a shadow of a doubt that we were supposed to adopt and we were supposed to start NOW!God moved. That’s all.
Then He asked me, “So what good is this crusade you are on to open people’s eyes to plight of the orphan?” All the facebook statuses, and videos that make you cry, and what not. (Ok, the Holy Spirit didn’t say “what not” but our youth say it a lot and it makes me want to giggle every time.) I got what He was saying. He was releasing me from my self appointed call to arms. He was telling me to just live and to just love.
Second part of my story seems totally random and did not fit with the paragraph above in my mind last night, but today I realized they were pieces to the same puzzle. To start, I must admit that I have an annoying habit of letting things get to me. Lately I have been letting perfect moms get under my skin. That durn facebook (again) was the source. Sometimes its the moms who post about the 8 miles they ran before breakfast. Sometimes its the moms who post that their children have never eaten one single chicken nugget. Sometimes its the moms who post pictures of themselves looking totally sexy, puckering up their lips and looking like they should be in a VS magazine. All astonishing feats, all completely outside my ability, and all with the power to get under my skin and cause insecurity that spreads like wildfire. (yes, my kids never eating a chicken nugget is outside my ability – deal with it!
The Lord encouraged me last night as I read a blog on destinyinbloom.com about being the woman God has called ME to be. The author wrote that Prov. 31 would look different if it was written about ME. And different is OKAY!!Part Three: I was having lunch today with a friend. I was telling her about the blog I read and how I had been letting “perfect moms” get under my skin. That lead to us talking about how easy it is to turn our passions into a judgment on others. For instance, both my friend and I have had an occasion when we “passionately” went into our views on abortion only to find out, or have reason to believe, later on that the woman listening to us had, had an abortion herself. We talked about how in that moment for both of us, we realized how judgmental and void of love our “passion” seemed in the light of the anguish these women carry as a result of their experience.
We allow our hearts to be molded by the Lord and we surrender to the forming He wants to do in us, but then we start down a dangerous road. We start considering our hearts more like God than those around us. We see those around us whose passion is taking care of their physical bodies, or educating their children, or being proactive politically and its so easy to let our own insecurity cause us to be angry at them for thinking they are better than us. But OUR passions….okay let me just be honest here…my passion seemed so right, so important that I moved from walking out HIS calling in my life, to campaigning what I had claimed as MY calling. I believe the Lord showed me today that feeling possessive of His calling…making it my own, making it about me, sucked the beauty out it. That intimacy that I felt when we first said yes to God has all but vanished as I have made something between my husband and I, and God into something very public.
Will I still post videos on facebook? Maybe. Will we still fundraise? Probably. Will I continue to share with others where we are on this journey? Yes! But my heart is in a completely different place. It is about us and God again. He is calling me to Himself these days. Calling me to draw near to Him. At the beginning of the year as I was praying for what He wanted for me for 2011, I heard Him say, “I want to tell you secrets and I want you to tell me some back. And I want them to stay between us.” I think this is what He is telling me most of all through this and through the other things He has been showing me lately. He wants me to value more than anything….Him. My God. The Lover of my Soul. Everything is truly all about Him.
