Yet I will rejoice in the LORD

I know what you're thinking - how many posts are there going to be in a single day? This is the last one, I think... :)

I just wanted to share that God has been doing some amazing things in me these last few days. He has shown me things that I have been holding onto that I had no idea about. I'd like to share the story with you, because I am so excited and so hopeful and I want people to know.

On Sunday evening Alan and I sat down to pray and journal together. After inviting the Holy Spirit to speak to us and do His work in those moments, Alan suggested we journal out all of our wants. We were going to write down everything we wanted - not just now, but anything we could possibly think of wanting - from an overall sense of satisfaction in life to a fireplace in our home one day (can you guess which of those two was mine? ;-)

So I sat there, pen in hand (I'm always the secretary :) and wrote down the couple of things Alan initially said. Then Alan asked me what I wanted, and I couldn't write. I didn't want to. I felt angry. Frustrated. Overwhelmed. In despair. Alan attributes what happened next to the speaking of the Holy Spirit. He said to me, "Make a column on the other side of the paper. You [speaking to me] are going to write out all of your fears." I thought, this is dumb. Like this is gonna help anything... I started writing nonetheless and several pages, many minutes, and lots of tears later I finally stopped. I never, until that moment, knew how much I was afraid of, and the topics ranged from one extreme to the other: fear of being forgotten all the way down to the fear of never living somewhere with a fireplace. Fears I never told God before. How could I? I had never told myself.

Once the fears were out the wants started flowing. The list of wants was not nearly as long as the list of fears, but we wrote and wrote until we could think of nothing else. Now God knows. Now we know. There is indeed so much freedom in that amount of honesty and openness - not only before God but between one another within our marriage.

Believe it or not, that was only the beginning of the story... :)

Earlier last week, before Sunday, I sat down to do something called the Daily Examen (this isn't the greatest link but one of the better ones I found). My boss had sent it out to our D.Min. staff so we could use it to prepare for our staff retreat which took place Wednesday this week. The five steps to the Examen are 1. Thanksgiving 2. Intention 3. Examination 4. Contrition 5. Hope. When I read through it last week to try to sit down and do it I got to the Hope section and thought, this exercise is not for people like me in my situation in life. Oh well. And I gave up on it. I didn't know at the time that the reason I couldn't do it was probably because I had been feeling pretty hopeless.

After Sunday, on Monday afternoon, I sat down to try to do it again. It was a whole different ball game. The whole thing doesn't take much time at all (even though I did write it all out) but it made all the difference in my day, my week, my life. I felt like I could sit there and be perfectly honest with God, telling Him exactly the things which came to mind for which I was thankful that day, what I really wanted for the day, how I had experienced His love that day, how I had sinned that day, and what choices I would make that day to allow Him to lead me to a brighter tomorrow.

THEN... on Wednesday morning at our staff retreat we spent two hours in solitude and quiet that we could basically spend however we wanted. (How cool is that that I have a job that pays me to spend two hours alone with God!?) During some group prayer time my boss read the account of the feeding of the five thousand from John. He also mentioned that in the account in Matthew's gospel when the disciples tell Jesus the number of loaves and fish they have, Jesus says to them, "Bring them to me." I spent a lot of time meditating on this phrase during my two hours. Bring them to me. I felt God telling me that I was to bring everything I am to Him. Jesus asked the disciples to bring to him what they had. They could not bring more than what they had and in doing so had to bring their inadequacies as well. But the miracle is that Jesus indeed worked with what they gave Him, but He did not work the miracle until they gave Him what they had. In that moment I felt so thankful that God had prompted me to bring myself to Him - mostly my inadequacies - on Sunday and spared me that experience yesterday morning. I felt like this extra time of solitude that I had been given allowed me to tie up the loose ends and continue to move ahead since Sunday's breakthrough.

Believe it or not my two hours was not yet up at this point so I decided to pick a book of the Bible to read. I landed on Habakkuk. I knew it was short, I hadn't read it in a while, and it also contains one of my favorite verses, 2:20. When I got to the end of the book I was reminded of some of my other favorite verses that had not come to mind in a long time...

Though the fig tree does not bud,
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign LORD is my strength.

Hab. 3:17-18, 19a