When you slow down your pace and match your pace and rhythms with your Creator, you can experience His rest and His peace. If you’re driven or distracted, you may initially feel uncomfortable or guilty when you slow down. If you have anxiety, anger, fear, hurt, sadness, or regret that’s buried within, you may be disturbed when you begin to feel any of these difficult emotions. Instead of lingering with Jesus, who purchased your freedom and who offers you comfort and healing, you may find any number of excuses to shut you off and to shut God out. Your image of God and yourself and people may be so distorted that you’re confused about what’s real and what’s not real. But if you push through your feelings of discomfort, the Holy Spirit will lead you on an incredible journey. He’ll create a path and a place for you.
When your trust and faith get damaged, it can take a long time to begin the process of learning to trust God, yourself, and people. Oftentimes, we build “cases against” instead of “evidence for”, and everything that we experience is used to build walls around ourselves instead of bridges. But when your thoughts and feelings and body stop working, you may feel compelled to do something. If you have tried so many “somethings” and none of them have really worked, you might throw up a prayer or risk asking for help. I’ve found that until you get to the end of yourself, you’ll just keep striving for more until you shut down. You have to be willing and ready to follow God’s leading.
Dealing with your pain and problems is part of the journey into freedom. Developing trust is part of the process. Confronting your own excuses and defenses can position you to begin to connect, heal, and grow. When you have unhealed hurts or ungrieved losses, your loving, patient Heavenly Father who created you in His likeness will sit and walk and talk with you and comfort you in your brokenness. He will provide for you creative contexts where you can receive what’s missing and what’s needed. He’ll provide you with all of the time and resources that you need to extend His help and healing and encouragement. You may not trust His sovereign process or plan because life has been so painful, but Jesus’ heart and arms are wide open, and His pursuit of you comes from His unchanging heart of love and grace. Jesus reminds you again today, “You are mine.” “You don’t have to shy away or push away from My love.” The Lord is re-writing His redemptive love story through your life.
While God is preparing a heavenly place for you, His indwelling Spirit is creating places here on earth to minister to and through you for His glory. No one else is designed uniquely by God to do the good things that He’s planned in advance for you to do (Ephesians 2:10). As you open your mind and heart in faith to the One who created you for His glory, you may be asking, “Lord, what did you make me for?” “What do you want to create in and through my life?” If you dare to keep asking God to lead you where He’s taking you, it won’t always feel good. You’ll have to leave your comfort zone and venture out into the unknown and unfamiliar. God is with you and waiting for you to just trust Him with your life. God will use your gifts, talents, experiences, pain, problems, and passions to connect you with people who desperately need His help and healing.
If you’re trying to figure it all out ahead of time, you’re just going to pray and talk about creating it instead of trusting God and doing it. Faith and trust say “yes” to the Creator and Leader. One of my favorite pastors, Mark Batterson, has said that God is more intent to get you where He’s leading you than you are to get there, if you keep in step with His Spirit. When God patterned you into His likeness to create through you, God already knew in advance what He would carry you through in order to get there. Who you are becoming along the way is more important than what you will create for God and for others. Why? Because through the pain, problems, and pathways of life, God is forming and fashioning you into His likeness so that people can see Him through your eyes, your words, your reflexes, and your heart of love.
Maybe God had you in mind when He etched these lyrics in my mind when I composed my Talking Matters song. You were designed to be different. You have a dream you must pursue. To reflect the One who inspires you. To change the world by being you. Go ahead and fight it. Try to deny it. Run from it and hide it, but the truth keeps calling you. Our walls turn into bridges. Our scars become our badges. Restoration happens as we are free to love. I’ll end today’s blog with a Jesus-friendly invitation to go for a walk and talk with the Creator of the universe who loves you. He longs to create in and through you for the benefit of others. You can’t hang onto what you were if you want to become what you will be. Cling to Jesus and you’ll become like Him.