There's been a lot of re-prioritizing going on around here. Truth be told, I've been struggling. So many potential life changes swirling around me, and an equal dose of uncertainty to go with them. It's funny, because I also feel as though I've been more centered and consistent about reading my Bible and praying everyday. But like many people (read: females) I know, still I've had this nagging, deep-rooted need for control, and aching desire to force myself and my family into a routine so rigid the chaos won't have a millimeter to sneak in through. It's ridiculous, and I know it's ridiculous, but it's a struggle I deal with nearly every single day. And all this recently...well, probably because life was complicated enough before our house flooded and we moved in with my in-laws.
Our house. Ugh. I am beyond embarrassed every time someone asks us if we're back in our house and I have to answer "no," mustering as much positivity as I can manage and bracing myself for the inevitable "why" questions that follow. I feel as if that solitary syllable echoes for miles as the person calculates that this Halloween, in fact, marks the ninth month we have been living with Kyler's (amazingly gracious, unreasonably accommodating, and supernaturally patient) parents. Believe me when I say I've had more than a few ugly, emotional breakdowns over their graciousness and our inability to get our house completed and get out of their hair. I mean, it's seriously beyond sacrifice/mild inconvenience when the nasty stomach bug that started with your grandchildren makes its way through the house for the third time in three weeks. The kids are virtually dripping with Lysol, we've disinfected this house so many times. Essentially, the combination of haggling with our mortgage company (and needing their approval for every blessed thing we want to do as we remodel), reporting losses and repairs to our insurance company, finding replacement materials for our entire downstairs (some of which, like our lower cabinets, aren't sold anymore), and receiving only bits and pieces of the reimbursement money has all contributed to drawing this process out longer and longer. Add to that our own ridiculous schedules, the unpredictability of having three children four and under (read: unexpected puking, Elmer's glue all over the carpet 10 minutes before bedtime, refusal to nap/sleep/eat/drink/share), the difficulty of trying to sort out remodeling with home store specialists while wrangling said children, laziness/depression over this whole absurd situation and coping in unproductive ways, and here we are.
You may be expecting that this week it all came to a head, and I just completely lost it, hence the blogging. Not to disappoint you, but not exactly. More that I am slowly, surely learning to listen to that still, small voice inside my soul. I overslept Monday, and my dear, sweet husband let me. However, as happens frequently when I wake up with the kids (as opposed to before them), I was grumpy and had zero minutes to collect myself, my thoughts, or my hygiene routine, much less time for hot tea and quiet time with my Bible. The day went downhill from there. Callan was clingy. Kayden was obstinate. Cameron was just impossible. And I....I was absurdly impatient, mean, and ugly toward my children all morning. I chose to trudge through the morning on my own strength, and the result was hideous.
Upon getting all three boys to nap at the same time (which I don't see as a coincidence at all...) I promptly sat down to read and pray and spend some time with God. Keeping the baby monitor nearby, I plugged myself into my iPod and collapsed into a song that perfectly embodies my heart's cry right now. Click the link below to play the song on iLike. (Just do it. You need to hear it.)
But I know some of you will cheat. Or maybe the link will fail.
So hear are the lyrics:
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Let me be in love with what you love.
Let me be most satisfied in You.
Forsaking what this world has offered me,
I choose to be in love with You.
I will choose to be in love with You.
And let me know the peace that's mine in You,
And let me know the joy my heart can sing.
For I have nothing left apart from You;
I choose to call on Christ in me.
I will choose to call on Christ in me.
For in the fullness of who You are
I can rest in this place.
And giving over this my journey Lord,
I see nothing but your face.
And let me know that You have loved me first,
And let me know the weight of my response.
For you have long pursued my wandering heart;
I choose to glory in Your cross.
I will choose to glory in Your cross.
For in the fullness of who You are
I can rest in this place.
And giving over this my journey Lord,
I see nothing but your face.
And I bow down.
(My beloved here I am.)
Humbly, I bow down.
(My beloved here I am.)
Humbly, I bow down.
(My beloved here I am.)
I bow down.
Let me be in love with what you love.
Let me be most satisfied in You.
Forsaking what this world has offered me,
I choose to be in love with You.
I will choose to be in love with You.
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Listening to those words was incredibly cathartic. After a good cry to God while the song was on repeat, I felt soooo much better. And I felt like writing. This blog is long already, but I've got so much on my heart to share with you. Please keep reading.
The past few months (and week, even) have held so much potential for change. Choices to make that would have an enormous impact on our family in so many ways. Choices where both decisions, either "for" or "against" yielded an equally long list of pros and cons. Choices that I have agonized over, not knowing which would be the "right" decision, leaving me so distraught I've been physically ill. Like a lot of women I know, I have a hard time with fear, self-doubt, and trust. Not surprisingly, improvement in any one of those areas would yield improvement in the others. Thankfully, they are all completely within the realm of my control (though they do, perhaps ironically, require giving up the control). And they all hinge on my ability to choose.
I love Jesus, believe He is my one and only Savior, and strive to live for His glory. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, I hope you've gathered that, at the very least. You've no doubt also gathered, merely from my existence as an imperfect person, that I don't always do an outstanding (or even a mediocre) job of representing my faith to the world. I fail. A lot. Like when I totally lose my temper with my children, or have a total emotional breakdown over the sink full of stinking dishes. Well, the latter might just be PMS, but I could still use some supernatural help there. Still, there's a choice to be made, like when I wake up grumpy and choose to stay that way the remainder of the day, determined to bring everyone else down with me. Or, I choose to make myself smile and I intentionally remind myself of - frequently listing them - the things I am grateful for, including if necessary, a much-needed kick in the pants to get me out of my self-centered pity party.
And for those times when I've spent every last ounce of patience, or sucked the reservoir of happy thoughts completely dry, I choose to call on Christ in me. When I don't have the strength to face my circumstances on my own, He is right there ready to carry me through. In fact, I believe He's been there all along, waiting for me to humble myself (or for my increasingly difficult circumstances to do the humbling for me), get past my stubborn streak and ask for His help. He wants to help me, before I've spent every last ounce of patience. He wants to be my first line of defense, not my last resort.
Asking for His help is an all-or-nothing sort of deal, though. I can't surrender to Christ and then expect to get an a-la-carte version of Him, picking and choosing the parts of Him that suit my own preferred lifestyle. I can't choose to call on Him only when it suits my purpose, or only when I feel I need that supernatural little boost, or when I just don't feel like putting in the extra effort. Either I choose Him - all of Him - or I don't.
Incidentally, God makes choices too. Mercy, for one, withholding the punishment we ought to have. Grace is another choice, His free gift of lovingly giving us that which we do not deserve. He chooses to make claims that demand a response: claims to be the Creator of the universe, all that we are, all that we see, all that we know and infinitely more. Claims that He came to die for the sins of all mankind, past, present, and future, that he rose again victorious over death and reigns in heaven.
My choice then, my response to these claims, is faith. Loving and trusting my Lord for who He is and accepting the promises He has made me. Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of things about this world that I don't like. Pain. Suffering. Injustice. Loneliness. Wasps. Ranch dressing. I jest with those last two, but seriously, some of the things I don't like are merely preferential. Most are tough, tough subjects. Things that provoke hard questions and cause me to really wrestle with my faith. But my trust that God is good and all-powerful doesn't mean my faith is blind or foolish, because I also believe that my Lord is all-knowing. If I truly believe He is omnicient, and I am not, then I must accept that there are an infinitely great number of things that I do not and likely will not ever know or understand. This doesn't mean I shouldn't seek to understand them, or understand Him to the extent that I am able. But it also doesn't mean that because I don't understand, He owes me an explanation of why he chooses to do things the way He does. There's an old quote by Pastor J. Vernon McGee that I love:
"This is God's universe and He does things His way.
You may have a better way, but you don't have a universe."
For me, this requires a great deal of pride-swallowing, accepting that I may never know the answers to some of my "why" or "how" questions. Questions that may not be within my power to figure out by my own intellect. Questions that if I let them, will tear me apart on the inside, insisting that because I can't understand why, God must not be who He says He is. Seriously?! How ridiculous (and, by the way, self-centered) that I would assert that the Creator of the universe must not be all-powerful or all-good (or just plain not the Creator) simply because I, having only my perspective to rely on, can't wrap my brain around the existence of something (or lack thereof). Something I would have done differently, you know, in the universe I created from nothing.
So we make a choice. We choose to take Him at His Word, believe He is who He says He is, and commit to following after Him, obeying his commands and seeking His will, or we do not. This isn't always an easy choice, and for me, it's a choice I make every day. I recently rediscovered an older Third Day song:
"Lord, take from me my life,
when I don't have the strength to give it away to You."
It applies so perfectly to those days and seasons of my life when I know deep in my gut that I want faith, or I want to act on my faith (to reject who the world says I am and accept who my Father says I am), but my questions, doubt, pride, self-esteem, you-name-it are all getting in the way. I am getting in the way. So every day, every hour, every minute if need be, I choose. I choose whether I am going to believe God, believe His promises, and follow after Him, or I am not.
And when I choose Him, things change. Life's problems don't change. The chaos is still there, the questions are still there, and the giant pimple on my chin is still there. But I am different, and I am able to face the chaos and the questions (yep, even the zit) with a patience and perspective that I don't have on my own.
Do you remember my post on joy? Click here to read it. It's not a revolutionary concept, though it may be hard to implement at times. Choosing to allow Christ to revolutionize my perspective is no different; it's just that, a choice. So when my circumstances may scream impossible chaos, when I face difficult decisions, and when I find that attempting to control my life is consuming me, I can choose to turn my journey over to Christ.
I said at the beginning of this (absurdly long, hopefully not boring) blog post, I've recently been really wrestling with a huge decision (at least by my estimation, maybe not so much in the eternal scheme of things...) If I let myself, I obsess over the not knowing. The "what-ifs" consume me. The uncertainty of whether or not it is the "right" choice. And then God reminds me:
1Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy,
to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—
this is your spiritual act of worship.
2Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—
his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:1-2
And there it is. I don't need to focus on the decision, the "what-ifs" or the not knowing. Instead, I should be calling on Christ and choosing to focus on becoming who He has intended me to be. When I finally turn over my journey to His leading, let Him orchestrate the details and the direction, I find the peace I've been desperately trying to manufacture on my own all along. And...I'm contented to rest in the fullness of who He is. There's no need to fret anxiously over what the world offers me; I can be satisfied in who I am in Christ. I long for that peace, joy, and contentment. Don't you?
I know what choice I'm making. Will you make it with me? I'd love to encourage you in your journey.
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