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

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.

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

Encounters of the God Kind

Mikki — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:01:37 +0000

Many times I find myself reading in the Psalms, and many times I find “myself” in the Psalms. Their beauty leads me to do what they themselves often recommend. Selah. Pause and think about it. Layers and layers of truth and richness. The entire range of human emotions. The entirety of the Psalms including the Psalms of David express a true picture of humanness. Love and hate. Joy and grief. Praise and cursing. Ah, David, a man after God’s own heart, unafraid to feel and express his heart.

One of my favorites is Psalm 42, a Psalm written to describe one’s yearning for God in the middle of distress. The depth and truth of the Psalmist’s longing resonates within my heart.

As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So pants my soul for You, O God.
² My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?

The picture is of a mature deer, not a Bambi, a powerfully beautiful animal thirsting, longing for running, moving, living water. And then the Psalmist declares, “God, that is how I long for you! My soul, my inner being, my emotions, long for an encounter with a living God.”

Maybe there are two ways we learn about thirst. One is by natural processes of our humanness. We need water to live and thrive. Secondly, once we experience the power of having our thirst satisfied, we are forevermore dissatisfied with any other experience.

Paralleling that human experience with our spiritual thirst, we are created to know God in an intimate way. We were made to run our spiritual fuel tanks on God-a-nol. Secondly, once we have tasted what it means to have God quench our inner thirst, we can no longer be satisfied with any thing or any experience that falls short of encountering the true living God.

What does it mean to experience a living God? Well, what does life mean? Life must be distinguished from death. Easy, huh? Well the definition of life includes the fact that it is identified by growth, by changes that originate internally. A living God moves, speaks, sees, hears, and touches. Encountering a living God causes us to live, to grow and change internally.

What is going on in the Psalmist’s heart in Psalm 42 as he declares his longing? Is it, at least in part, a feeling of abandonment? The Psalmist says “How long will it be before I see your face God?” That’s my interpretation of appearing before God. In His presence. Seeing His face. When we are able to see someone’s face, we can look into their eyes and they can look into ours and we can know much about what is in their heart. It is hard to hide your emotions when someone peers into your eyes. We have heard that the eyes are the window into the soul and maybe that is true.

The Psalmist’s emotions rose up to accuse him. “Where is your God?” His enemies rose up to accuse him. “Where is your God?” Can we also conclude that his friends accused him? He was breaking the law and failing in his commitments. His emotions said that God had abandoned him. He was mourning because of the oppression of the enemy. His circumstances said that God had abandoned him.

In verse nine, the Psalmist cries out to God, “Why have you forgotten me?” The Psalmist found himself disconnected, disappointed, discouraged, disquieted. Disconnected with God, others (I used to go with the multitude), and his own soul. He was experiencing a loss of fellowship with others. He was experiencing a loss of the form of worship he was used to. I used to keep the pilgrim’s feast with the multitude. (How do you know God apart from your traditions?)

There was a way that he could stoke the fire of his experience of God. He spoke to himself. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves, aloud even, of what the truth is. The Psalmist declared, “I will hope in God. I will praise him.” Then this word “yet” is there staring at us. Here is the commitment…

Even though I am overwhelmed emotionally… Even though I don’t feel you God… Even though I feel alone…

Even though my circumstances scream that you have abandoned me… I will hope in You. I will praise You anyway. I will remember You from the land of my heritage. As I hear the noise of Your waterfalls and feel the brokenness as You wash relentlessly over me, I will believe in You day and night. I will pray to You. You are my life. I will be honest with You about my heart, my emotions. And yet, yet, yet…(as difficult as it may feel), I will hope in You, I will yet, yet, yet… praise You.

And then this beautiful phrase…”He is the help of my countenance and my God.” This theme runs quietly through Psalm 42. A face to face encounter with God. Verse two…”When will I be in God’s presence –the place where I can see Him?” Verse 5 “I need the help of seeing His face.” Verse 11 “He will help my countenance – my face.”

Change from the inside out. Encounters with a living God. Affecting our voice. Affecting our emotions. Affecting our face.

Yearning for God. You and I were created for relationship with Him. Nothing else can fill our deepest longings. No addiction can cover our longing completely. Alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, pornography, religion, nothing can completely quiet that inner longing within us. Nothing else is living water. Nothing else quenches our deepest thirsts. So even in times of distress, we reach out for His help. He is the only One who can change us from the inside out.

If you find yourself yearning, thirsting, and yet perhaps feeling abandoned, emotionally wiped out and broken, hope in God. Praise Him. Cry for His help. Remember how He helped you in the past. Look for His handprints around you. And know that He is not offended by your truth even if that means you feel abandoned by Him. That truth is the beginning place inside you. The place of growth. The place of life. The place of change where you can encounter a living God and be changed from the inside out.