Mikki's Blog - Living in the Grace and Love of God » Abandonment

With God in the Valley

Mikki — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:39:45 +0000

Recently I’ve been pondering how God leads me, at times, into the valley of the shadow of death, where life is uncertain, the terrain is difficult, and it’s just downright scary at times.

color:#4F3C30">Well, you might say, “God doesn’t do that.” Uh, I beg to differ. The Psalmist David, the one God Himself said was a “man after my own heart”, invited us to explore the reality of walking in that valley. Job, who was called “a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil”, certainly walked through the valley. Jesus Himself was “driven into the wilderness” to be tempted, and on the cross he faced the greatest darkness, as he took my sin and your sin and the sin of all humanity on himself and cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

color:#4F3C30">The mysteries of human suffering are beyond our grasp, and yet God invites us into them. While I do not believe that God causes evil and I understand that all evil and pain in the world are a result of the work of the enemy, I do believe that God uses human suffering to change us.

color:#4F3C30">In the valley, we struggle and grasp for answers. We wish we could explain the workings of God and the workings of evil in neat theological boxes and all the while God is whispering to us that it’s not so much understanding that we need but a releasing of our need to understand.

color:#4F3C30">Yes, God wants us to learn through our struggles and our suffering. Yes, God wants to give us insight, but beyond that God desires to lead us to the point where we can trust Him in the midst of our suffering.

color:#4F3C30">Frankly, I’ve flunked that test more times than I’ve passed. Oh, I passed lots of easy tests. The true/false ones. The fill-in-the-blank ones. But the essays! How I’ve hated those! The ones where I have to process through and come to a conclusion.

color:#4F3C30">Yet learning to trust God is a lot like those essay tests; a long and purposeful journey. Trusting God is a lifelong process. While I may be quite comfortable trusting God in one area of my life, I may find that I am completely unable and often unwilling to trust Him in another.

color:#4F3C30">And He knew that before He invited me to come into relationship with Him. He didn’t require my perfection. He knew my story before it began to be written. Through my story, He pursues my heart, wooing me to Himself. He challenges me to open new areas of my heart to Him. He asks me to live in the mystery.

color:#4F3C30">The work of God in me is “inside out”. I may be able to fake most of you off. You might spend an hour with me and think I’ve got it all together. You might even attend my church and think I’m a super Christian (you know what I mean, the ones with the S on their cape). But nothing in me is hidden from God. My times in the valley expose the depths of who I am and what I really believe about God, life, and myself. God is able to handle the truth about who I am and where I need to grow. He is committed to lead me into that truth, enabling me to face my own personal truths with His Spirit, and giving me extravagant grace to change.

color:#4F3C30">Sometimes the changes are easy, but often they come like winning a war, one battle at a time. The battles leave me wounded at times. Scarred. Limping like Jacob, but if I find what God is offering me, I leave the battle with deeply understood truth about who I am and who He is. Such truth leads me into new levels of trust. Surely such a God who would walk with me through the valley, correcting me at times, comforting me often, is worthy of my trust!

color:#4F3C30">My journey is much like peeling an onion, layer after layer of my resistance, my need to control, compare, and compete, get peeled away and I become more able to face the naked truth about myself and my life. I can live in the paradoxes. I can live in the mysteries, and I can say with the Psalmist David, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…I know you are with me.”

With God in the Valley

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8 Important Things to Know During Hard Times

Mikki — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 13:53:03 +0000

We all live in a world cursed because of sin. Part of the effect of that curse is hard times, difficulty, pain, and sorrow. I so wish I could tell you that Christians don’t have to go through any difficulties, but the Word of God contains story after story of believers in difficult times. Paul and Peter in prison, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Stephen being stoned, believers being persecuted, the very life of Jesus, and I could go on and on. And this list applies to all storms whether we caused them, Satan sent them, or God designed them. In a moment, I am going to share my list of eight things you should know about hard times but before I do that I need to give you some foundation.

Unfortunately some Christians’ theology denies the place of pain and suffering in the Christian life. This is a tragedy because such a theology shames a believer when they try to make sense of their trials and suggests that a good Christian, a faith-filled Christian, wouldn’t be subject to such difficulties. It is also unfortunate because it shames or rejects one of the primary paths to knowing God and becoming useful to Him and others.

The reality of living in a sin-cursed world has to be reconciled to the heart of God. God never intended us to live under the curse of sin and in the end all will be restored to us as it was in the Garden of Eden. And we are in a process of restoration. However an honest Christian faith which represents an honest Christian God must deal with the truth about pain and suffering in order to throw the rope of faith to struggling believers in the midst of difficulty.

My life has not been exempt from pain and suffering although I am certain mine has been far less than many others’. Yet from my personal walk I can offer a few thoughts which can help you make it through hard times and become better. As I begin this list, I am going to assume that you know prayer is important. I am going to assume that you know the Word is important. I am going to assume that you know communion with God is important. My intention is to focus on some of the other things that I have learned as a result of my trials.

1. God is giving you an opportunity to know more of His heart. He is working to reveal a greater knowledge of Himself to you. He wants to use this difficulty to deepen your relationship. He is teaching you that He is faithful. We really can’t understand what God’s faithfulness is until we feel abandoned and eventually, and I said eventually, wind up in the place where we can see His handiwork. When I walked through my darkest storm 2 years ago, I felt abandoned by so many and by God most of all. God allowed it and He used it.

2. God is giving you an opportunity to know more of your own heart. God knows your heart better than you do. He is working to teach you more about your own heart. This is a priceless gift from His hand. Contrary to what you might think at first, I am not talking about how dark your heart is. I am talking about how God uses every storm to reveal your woundedness, your unwholeness, which is hindering your relationship with Him and others. For example, my storm brought up every core issue in my life. The fear of abandonment. Rejection. And on and on, but here’s the point. God is getting at something – or many things – inside you. When you know your heart better, you can recognize the lies of the enemy when they come against you again.

3. God wants to use your storm to make you better. Your faith will be tested and tried and PURIFIED. There is nothing too dark, too black, too hopeless, too hard, that God cannot use it for your glory. As 2 Cor. 4:17 says, our afflictions are working something greater in us that we can know. The end result will be glorious for us if we embrace what God wants to do in our hearts.

4. You will fail God during the storm. I am not trying to discourage you or speak a curse over you, but it the nature of a storm distorts your vision. Everything becomes dark and hopeless. You lose your footing. You grope in the darkness. God offers mercy to us all. He “remembers that we are made from dust.”

5. The storm has the potential to destroy you. Storms are powerful, destructive forces. As during all our life experiences, we have the power to chose each day whether to trust ourselves or to trust God. Do we rely on our own strengths to fix this thing? Perhaps you default to manipulation or control. Whatever or however you react in the storm, it really comes down to this: Will I trust myself or will I trust God? We often choose to trust ourselves even though our mouths are saying we trust God. Our actions are screaming, “I am going to fix this!”

6. Freedom can be found in the suffering. Just as our ultimate freedom was found in the suffering of Christ on the cross, our emotional, mental freedom can be found in our suffering. As we find ourselves vulnerable, we can learn to deny ourselves and find freedom in and through the suffering. Again, the ways of God often make no sense to us in our humanity.

7. Your suffering can provide a way for you to be like Christ and provide healing for others. As Henri Nouwen teaches, you can choose to make your wounds available to others as a source of healing just as Christ was our wounded Healer.

8. In God’s reign, “everything belongs,” even the broken and poor parts (Richard Rohr). Nothing catches God off guard. He really does work everything together for our good.

So if you find yourself in a storm, in hard times, my testimony to you is that you hold something powerful in your hands. It is an opportunity to be destroyed or it is an opportunity to be transformed. The darkness will pass eventually, the clouds will clear, the wind will cease, and the end result for you individually can be that you know more of God’s heart, that you have learned to trust, and that He has healed your heart in ways that you didn’t even know you needed before. That is one of the beautiful things about serving a God who is mysterious, powerful, and all-knowing.

Perhaps you might pause and ask Him to help you cooperate with His plans in your life, submitting your heart and will to His anew. Is it hard? Yes. Is it worth it? Unequivocally.

8 Important Things to Know During Hard Times

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My Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Mikki — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:04:51 +0000

In 1969, Paul Simon wrote a powerful song which he and Art Garfunkel recorded in 1970. The expression of Paul’s heart in the song conveys the message that he would be a friend when friends could not be found; that he, himself, would be a bridge over his friend’s troubled water.

I was so struck by this thought yesterday as I listened to a lovely lady share how she had endured so many difficult things, felt alone so often, but God had revealed to her through a prayer team at our church that He had been her bridge every time over those troubled waters. She had not, in fact, been alone. God was there.

How many times have we felt abandoned during our hard times? And truthfully, many people do abandon us, but one thing I have begun to ask God in the last couple of years is that He would show me where He was during dark moments in my past. I, too, find that He has been my bridge, and that often the way He has done that was through others as they became “bridges” for me to walk on. My heart was moved to write these thoughts…

The Bridge

I hear the water below me
The power of its rushing
Stirs the fear within me
Yet the other side
Beckons me to keep walking

This bridge under my feet
Gives me strength
Although it doesn’t completely
Take my fears away

Providing a place to step
Giving passage over the raging waters
Moving me onward to the other side

When I pause to look down at this bridge under my feet
I question whether it can hold me
And over the chasm it answers
Only with its presence

A voice within me rises up
Crying for a way to go back
But the former place
Has no solace any longer

Once on the other side
I look back at my bridge
“My God!” I cry,
“That was too dangerous!
How could you entrust me into
The hands of human bridges?"

His Spirit whispers to me
That it was One
In the form of a human bridge
Who laid himself down over the waters for me

And I realize that my steps
Across the bridge
Ripped another layer of self-reliance
From me

My trip across the troubled waters
Stirred within me wrong ideas I had
About You and others
And the bridge revealed to me
The truth of who You are
The reality of Your love

You gently remind me that Your path of rescue
Is always revealing
Revealing You
And revealing me
Your love, passion, strength, purpose
My fears, struggles, weaknesses, doubts

And I find that places within my dead, numb heart
Are renewed to live again
My understanding is clearer
My heart is becoming whole

I fall on my knees
And I thank You, Lord, for being my bridge over troubled waters, and
I thank You for those who bridged the waters for me

And I wrestle…

Struggling to come to another truth…

But finally I see…

And in surrender I release my thanksgiving to You

…for the troubled water itself

My Bridge Over Troubled Waters

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