This postIsn’t it funny how we forget things so easily? Just a month ago I wrote about trusting in God, then promptly forgot pretty much everything I’d said in that post and returned to my crowded nest of worries. Over the last week, though, after stewing about on inadequacies both real and imagined, I’ve realized once more that I have to just place my trust in the Lord.
Now, there are some things I can do pretty well on my own. (Or at least what I assume is on my own; perhaps his hand has more a part in it than I realize.)
But then there are the things I think I can do but actually can’t, and the things I know I can’t do on my own. It’s maddeningly frustrating to be incapable of doing something, especially something which ought to be so simple, so easy. Makes me want to tear my hair out. (But then where would I be? I’m not as ready to go bald as I thought. :P)
After I buzz about in frantic worry long enough to wear the carpet down to the floorboards, though, the feeling changes. It deepens, expanding into a vise-like weight that pushes me down to my knees and wrings my soul raw. All I can do is watch my pride drip away, far below. I’m left quivering and vulnerable.
And it’s then that the second change happens. I surrender. I let go my obsessive grip on my future — what I think is my future, at any rate, with all its incomplete and skewed data that makes it worth nowhere near what I appraise it at — and I calm down into a peaceful quietness that fills my soul. “It’s okay” is the murmur that sounds in the corners of my heart. I don’t have to worry any more. Someone else is taking care of that for me.
Sometimes it’s then that I find my abilities have jumped up a level or two, and suddenly I can do the thing I couldn’t do before. But more often I’m left where I was before — nothing’s changed, really.
Except me. In giving myself up to God, trusting in his promises, I grow. Those forces tug on me and enlarge my soul, and then they start replacing bits and pieces of the old me with a new, refined, more God-like me. I may still be in the same boat I was before, but I’ve got new eyes that bring the surrounding sea into sharper and more vivid clarity. It makes a difference. Or at least it does if I let it.
It’s a process that takes a lifetime, of course. It hurts. But it hurts in a good way. C.S. Lewis said it so much better than me:
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurt abominably and does not seem to make sense. What oil earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of-throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
