James 4:1, “What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members?”There is a saying that goes something like this. The man gets married expecting the wife not to change. The wife gets married expecting the man to change. What a perfect analogy for our relationship to God as well. We get saved expecting that our image of God in that moment is the correct, complete image. That we see Him clearly and nothing will be different. The truth is far from that because to gaze into infinity feels like change though it is not. Likewise we (I) feel like forgiveness is all encompassing and there is no need to change further. Oh how wrong that is.
And so I find myself at a place where the pace and volume of change is overwhelming. (All a plan by God anyway to exhaust my efforts so that it can be about Him.) As a result my feelings are left raw and sensitive. No more change my soul screams in its emotional exhaustion. It is in this raw, shaken state that I see the Holy Spirit once again confronting something that I had thought long since gone. Inside me there is something screaming, what about me? What about my feelings? Why do I have to be empathetic when no one is empathetic with me? Why do I have to apologize when no on apologizes to me? The Toby Keith song “I Wanna Talk About Me” plays in my head. Me… MY… I wanna talk about me! What about what I think? I want recognition for all I've done. Where is my praise? Where is my reward? My.. My... My... My... ME!!! Is there no place in this world that is about me? Work, home, family... it's all about someone else.
On the outside it is just me screaming. At the slightest violation of my feelings I explode. I feel like a thermometer heated to the point of driving the mercury clear out the top. Like I said, I have been here before in a distant past, but why is it rearing its ugly head again in the past 30 days?
As I seek God in the midst of my sin. (Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, Eph 4:26) I hear clearly that it’s time to shake this from my soul, from my character. I assume that psychologists might argue I am having difficulty in expressing my feelings. I might argue that my feelings are clear in the outburst, what is not clear is the apology or empathy for my feelings. Regardless, the truth is that God has appointed this time for me to learn to own those feelings. I hear Him saying that I need to accept them, but not react to them. I don’t know how that is going to go, but Jesus certainly did give us a perfect example on the cross of owning our feelings but not reacting.
He could have climbed down off that cross. He could have called down fire from heaven on His attackers. But instead He owned the pain. He owned the feelings, even in the confusion of them calling out to God and asking why He had forsaken Him. (Matt 27:46)
I am not forsaken. My feelings and emotional pain is nothing in comparison to the cross. But in the end I want to be more Christ like. I want to be angry without the sin. And so I trust God that He will show me the way, just has He has shown me the lesson.
Having written this I turned to my daily devotionals and this is what I read from Henri Nouwen. "Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else."
Not finished God's shows me this in Oswald Chamber's writings, "The child of God who walks alone with Him is not dependent on places and moods but carries to the world the perpetual mystery of a dignity, unruffled, and unstung by insult, untouched by shame and martyrdom."
As if I could ever doubt that God is in complete control.
Having written this I turned to my daily devotionals and this is what I read from Henri Nouwen. "Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else."
Not finished God's shows me this in Oswald Chamber's writings, "The child of God who walks alone with Him is not dependent on places and moods but carries to the world the perpetual mystery of a dignity, unruffled, and unstung by insult, untouched by shame and martyrdom."
As if I could ever doubt that God is in complete control.
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