God has me on a journey, amen? He has you on one too, whether you're aware of it or not :)
Lately I've been learning my absolute dependence on the Lord, that my status with Him never changes no matter what I am or am not doing (thinking especially of recent unemployment and ensuing struggle) and that He is enough. Everything left, you know? I had been depending on and looking to a lot of things--money, having a job, being independent, going to the mission field--and God has done some purifying...at times it has been difficult, but I have chosen not to shrink back. When all the doors close, it makes you start looking for new direction--and sometimes all He wants is just to spend some quality time with Him, looking into His face and asking questions and getting familiar with Him and His voice. I've been praying a lot and just being with Him in this season--and I've come to a place where its all I want to do. I would take a job that He set in front of me, if it was given with His blessing and guiding, but that's no longer my focus. I just want to see His face and have the glory of His Presence shine down around me--you know?
I feel that these few paragraphs from Frederick Buechner sum up all I've been learning from the Lord recently--well, actually throughout my whole life and especially in the last few months the lesson has really come home to my heart and made its home there. May these words bless you as they've blessed me and helped me see the reality of this God who loves me despite all my faults, the ways I'll fail Him and my crazy heart in need of renewal--He's good!
A little bit of context: in this section of the book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale Buechner approaches the parable of the prodigal son (and the other true stories of the Bible) as the joke of God which only a few get:
"Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church's thing, the preacher's thing, the lecturer's thing. Heard as a joke--high and unbidden and ringing with laughter--it can only be God's thing.
"And if it is a joke about the preposterousness of God, it is also a joke about the preposterousness of man as the sequel to the parable exemplifies. The word sin is somehow too grand a word to apply to the reaction of the prodigal's elder brother when the sound of the hoedown reaches him out in the pasture among the cow flops, and yet in another way it is just the right word because nowhere is the deadliness of all seven of the deadly sins deadlier or more ludicrous than it is in him. Envy and pride and anger and covetousness, they are all there. Even sloth is there as he sits on his patrimony and lets it gain interest for him without lifting a hand, even lust as he slavers over the harlots whom he he points out the prodigal has squandered his cash on. The elder brother is Pecksniff. He is Tartuffe. He is what Mark Twain called a good man in the worst sense of the word. He is a caricature of all that is joyless and petty and self-serving about all of us. The joke of it is that of course his father loves him even so, and has always loved him and will always love him, only the elder brother never noticed it because it was never love he was bucking for but only his due. The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his, too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them. 'The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up' even as the prodigal himself was raised up, Jesus says, 'and blessed is he who takes no offense at me' (Matt. 11:5-6). Blessed is he who is not offended that no man receives what he deserves but vastly more. Blessed is he who gets that joke, who sees that miracle."(pgs. 68-69)
Are you getting it in your own life? Take joy! Your Father has given you the Kingdom!
I relate to this passage so well because as a Christian at first I was totally of this mindset: trying to earn my way into the kingdom, too afraid to try for love because I didn't even realize it was what I was missing. I've been on a big journey--still am--to learn to love those around me and see them the way they are--worthy and beloved of God, destined to know Him well if they so chose. I grew up in the church and I was very good at following the moral rules and doing what was right in man's eyes--my salvation was something I was earning (how preposterous!!! seen from my new vantage point). Then I grew up and learned how little and completely unable I was (enter Haiti) but God still loved me in the midst of that breaking down and showed me how He is able--He is at work and faithful in this wacky world from which we live. I was never the same after that season! but I still had to unlearn (and am unlearning and will always unlearn) my elder brother mindset--thank God for His grace. He took my fears and taught me to search out His love--O! the Glory!
I'm so grateful for where He has me and how He chooses to be good to me--it's beyond what I could have hoped, asked or imagined--but that's just how good He is. Find out the ways He's working in your life and thank Him today. He is good to us.
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