Dear Friend,
I’m reading this book, The Broken Way by Ann Voskamp and its breaking me up and how I’m seeing my life.
This love word for the year is doing the same thing. I’m always amazed at how God uses everyday things to teach us about life if we slow ourselves down enough to see it.
The song As You Find Me by Hillsong UNITED ties into all this as well. It’s like a collision of reminders and shout outs from God to this crazy mid-life lady. She’s working on figuring out how all these things fit together in a neat little package called life — because that’s how she like things — neat little packages tied with a pretty bow.
But He doesn’t wrap things like that…well, maybe He does… but not in this crazy lady’s life. Instead He keeps surprising me through events and interceptions of life passes. I think I’ve got it together and then He throws me another pass and I feel at times I’m fumbling but He loves me any way.
He loves me…even in my fumbling state.
At times I feel I’m grasping for breath and drowning in who I am and my own lost-ness. My own incompleteness. My own feelings of not being enough. But then God’s hand reaches down and takes ahold of me in my splashing about of my own efforts. He lifts me out of my own wretchedness —- my own way of trying to save myself. He lifts me out of all that.
He loves me… even in my own wretchedness.
It’s not about being good enough or doing enough.
It’s about letting Him be enough… because He is.
What He has for us is enough.
He is enough.
Resting in His ‘enough-ness’ to sustain us and nourish our souls is what we need.
My own inner expectations drive me into a downward cycle of not being enough. It’s not other people’s expectations but my own and my own assumptions of what I believe others want from me. When in reality — they are not looking for that at all.
This year of discovering His grace and love is far deeper and greater, richer and extensive than I imagined or realized. At the beginning of this year, I wondered why God would steer me towards learning LOVE.
“Love is easy,” my Sunday School self said. “Jesus loves me this I know.” and “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind… and love your neighbor as yourself.” My Sunday School self says, “I got this!” But do I really?
Do I understand how deep and extensive that really is?
I don’t think so.
I’m learning and growing – but by far – I don’t have it figured out.
It’s like Ephesians 3:18, “… how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ… to know this love that surpasses knowledge…”
I can’t know it. I can’t even grasp it. My categories of understanding that I neatly set up and organize are bursting and blowing apart.
It’s this breaking up of my categories and this broken way that is bringing new understanding that in the end, I will still not fully comprehend. And how can we?
How can we understand and comprehend a God so great?
It’s beyond me.
And for one who likes her categories to fit nicely and her understanding tidy and wrapped with a pretty bow — it’s this undoing that is surprisingly bringing healing to one who didn’t realize how broken she is.
In this brokenness, I’m realizing again it’s not my doing or getting everything right and perfect that fullness of life comes. Instead it’s in HIS workmanship. It’s in HIS doing that I find who I am.
“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance… and His incomparably great power for us who believe.” ~ Ephesians 1:18-19
I’m not good enough nor do I know enough to get it all right. And that’s okay. My perfectionist self is dying and it’s such a load off of me. It’s freeing to not have that voice of perfection screaming in my head.
Not sure if that’s my crazy lady self getting older and maturing -OR – God working all things for my good. (I’m thinking it’s a working of both.)
He shapes us through our struggles and this perfectionist self has been a struggle.
He loves me in my struggles.
And the same goes for you.
He loves you right where you are — right in the middle of your mess and imperfection.
He loves you in your struggles.
He loves you in your fumbling state.
He can lift you out of that which surrounds you.
He loves you right where He finds you.
Tripping Over Typeset 