Word.....

My last post might have alarmed some of you who read it. Please don't be alarmed, I am fine. My mental health is fine I just felt like a deep dose of honesty never hurt anyone. I was talking to someone at church yesterday, a brother in the Lord. He had come up to me to tell me that the word that I gave had really encouraged him (John had told him to tell me because minutes before I had told John I wasn't going to give any words anymore because they came out sounding stupid :). It was awesome because as he explained the whole process of how the word had impacted him, he gave me a word from the Lord!  It never ceases to amaze me how our God works at helping us to see that He is always at work on our behalf.  

As I said in the previous post. I have really struggled with doing the right thing.  After I wrote that post the Lord led me to a time with Him that revealed some of my own sin, my own thinking that was wrong and that needed correcting.  Even after He showed it to me I still resisted.  I pushed back, I fought Him and still He would say to me, "I told you what was wrong, how to fix it and what to do so the choice is up to you."  I could almost see Him just waiting on me to figure out my own twisted thinking and most certainly the choice was mine to do the right thing.  Pastor Arte often says the right thing to do is the hard thing to do and this most definitely was the hardest thing I could think of to do!!!  I woke up on Thanksgiving morning and lay there in bed just sort of floating in my sleepiness when I thought to myself.  "today I am doing to choose to begin to move to do the right thing, I am going to open my heart as much as I am able and allow, even if it hurts, some light into it in this place of pain."  This was HUGE for me.  Since then I have begun to remind myself more and more, when I am tempted to shut down that part of my heart, that I made a choice to open it and to begin to let healing come into it.  It hasn't been easy and I have failed a few times but its a start.  

The word Steve from church shared with me without knowing it was this...He had been hunting all day in the snow, he got so caught up in tracking the elk that he didn't pay attention to how far he had gone and when he stopped and realized that it was going to be dark soon and that he was a long way away from the house and that he was starving from no food all day long. He wasn't all that excited about getting back!  He said he stood there in the bottom of a canyon and while eating some jerkey and drinking a bit of water, he looked up at this great big hillside that went straight up and he did NOT want to climb it.  But he heard the Lord say to him, "just take it one step at a time" and so he began to climb up that steep hillside and make it to the road he knew was at the top.  When he shared that with me and how the word I gave went with what he had experienced, I thought, "the Lord is trying to tell me something here."  I could see myself in this deep deep valley with high mountains on both sides, just a gulley in the middle where I was standing, barely a path between them.  They were both covered with snow and I could even see my breath.  There was no way out of that canyon except up and I was choosing, in my own stubbornness (spiritually speaking) to stand in the snow at the bottom and refusing to move.  Standing there, in the snow, blue sky above me, my breath making big puffs in the air, my feet are cold and icy and I don't want to be all alone down there in that valley but I don't know what is up at the top and I don't think I can make the climb.  In that moment, as Steve shared with me, I realized the decidedly insaneness of my decision to not choose to do the right thing with the Lord.  Steve said that as he worshipped, after receiving that word, he could see this image of him climbing that hill and getting back to the house and in front of him was this glowing white image of the cross and it was moving, guiding him.  He wanted it to be stationary and not move, to guide him the way he thought it should but thats not what the Lord had for him to see!  Okay so now I am thinking, I think I gave that word so that Steve would come up and give me this one!!! Seriously!!! I could see what Steve was describing and how much my heart has been refusing to let the Lord work in my life the way HE wants to.  I have been having a spiritual temper tantrum of epic proportions!!!!   But hearing that picture/seeing that image in my minds eye, helped me see what I have been doing to myself.  I am relieved!

Now to the hard work of living out the right thing!

oh...and by the way...the word I gave was about how we starve ourselves physically sometimes so that when we finally eat we will eat all kinds of junk food and pig out on things not good for us. We do the same thing spiritually when we don't read the word, we begin to consume all kinds of spiritual junk like tv, computer, books....just to fill that void that would have been filled with the Lord had we chosen to consume His word and not something else.