I’m listening to a song
called “Quiet Peace” by Justin Byrne as I sit in a café by the Garavogue River,
trying to process my beautiful life. I'm just a simple, everyday girl who keeps following God and is amazed at the spaces she finds herself in. Sunny in Ireland? In Ireland? Reinstated to her calling when she thought it was all over? Who is this God I serve? I will never reach the end...
Do you ever have those
moments when you realize, ‘This is too beautiful for me?’ And then you stop…and
you realize that it is not up to you to determine what is or isn’t good enough
for you. It was never your job (as our speaker last week made us repeat over
and over “He’s Almighty God and He’s not taking applications”) to determine how
much you were worth or where you should serve or how it should all play out. It
was (and is) my job to draw ever closer to my Creator and follow as He leads.
The brokenness I and my friends have experienced in the last years is not due
to any fault of God: there were human beings with human choices involved.
Each one was listening to or
deliberately disobeying God, choosing to disregard words and direction they had
given them or even just forgetting to ask. There’s a whole spectrum. We all
make choices, for good or ill; and even slightly misdirected humans can cause
catastrophic damage. Of this the last few years of my life have convinced me.
So my determination is to lean in, as far as I can, with all my human failings
on board, and get to know Him.
The leading brings me to
this spring-like day, amidst a group of silly, beautiful young women, each with
grace and beauty that they hold, so many gifts in them already, each learning,
just as I am, how to submit these gifts and graces to Him so that He may fill
them fully with Himself.
Himself.
I’m learning that that’s all
I want. That’s all I need, that’s where I find myself and how I even find
myself here. Here, the place He asked me to go…
I honestly shouldn’t be
here. I didn’t have the funds until I started to move. I bought the tickets on
faith, with little to no idea that I would get to go (and even less faith).
There was nothing that I saw in me that made me qualified. I knew that. But I
also knew how He was already working in me, so I kept my eyes and heart open,
following the leading that He gave me.
And now: restoration has
become my lot. The verse that I was given in Isaiah 40 a few months ago becomes
more true day by day, as restoration and comfort become mine:
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says
your God.
Speak tenderly to
Jerusalem,
and
cry to her
that she has served
her term,
that
her penalty is paid,
that she has received
from the Lord’s hand
double
for all her sins.
I have been paid double for
all my brokenness. I stand restored, in favor, because of His work in my life.
Even this week, I was honest
and open with our speaker. I knew Isaiah 61 was for me and that part of being
able to offer all that the Lord promises in those verses comes from going
through those things. Well, call me the brokenhearted one who has been bound
up!
The truth is, and will
always be, that grace is sufficient. Not unmerited grace, like they like to
call it, but actually being able to live out your life for Him because you have
been given His life. Resurrection and His power now stand in all the places I
was so broken before.
My whole life is about pursuing
Him. That means, for now, living in Ireland, cooking and living with and
speaking words of life to a precious group of girls. It may mean that I work
with refugees in the future or find myself teaching again, or in an orphanage
or any where! I am not the determiner of my fate. But this I do know: Jesus
lives in me and my pursuit is after Him. He has blessed me beyond measure and I
don’t see it stopping. I love being His…that the world may know. That the world
may know. That may sound trite and simple, but Jesus is not an idea or someone
I talk with every now and then anymore…it’s more. He’s life and I know that as
I move with Him through this world, atmospheres have to change. Not because of
any power of my own, but because He’s moving. How else do you explain a
summer’s day on October 1st in Ireland?
My life is made beautiful
for me.
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