Practice makes Perfect

Jeremiah 29:11, “’For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not calamity to give you a future and a hope.’”

Over the past week to week and a half the Holy Spirit has brought be back through some lessons learned so to speak. Showing me once again the scriptures and the practices that He taught me in the many lessons of surrender. I wondered aloud and in my spirit, why?

I know these lessons, does He want me to write them for others? Are these things merely appearing in my path as blog fodder?

And as soon as I can have these thoughts, which are really the awareness that God is moving; I have half my month’s production at work blow up. Three of the six mortgages providing me commissioned paychecks for the month of November evaporate into thin air with a variety of issues. This did not immediately give me the thought of trusting God. In fact, even though the Spirit of God was telling I was about to go through yet another lesson of trusting God, of surrendering my cares and concerns to Him, I still was shocked that my loans fell apart. I keep waiting for the return of the financial blessings, I keep thinking today is the day it’s going to happen, and the Holy Spirit was saying He needs to perfect a lesson of reliance in me. He was saying We are going to go backwards and revisit basic coming to Me. He was reminding me that prayer is awareness of relationship, not a presentation of a grocery or laundry list. And so lacking the realization at the time I went my Iwo Jima meeting out of exhaustion. I went to get away from the problems.

There sitting in a group of 12 incredible men my phone starts buzzing. Texts are pouring in from a client, a Realtor  and my processor… a fourth deal is blowing up. I am totally checked out at this point. One of two people has shared something that I completely ignored, and there was a minute or two of silence. As if he couldn't sit in silence George, the poster child of PTSD and lifelong dependent of the psychotherapy world chimes in. He begins by telling us that he went to his therapists this week with nothing to talk about, nothing particular to work on. And in my pain and confusion of what I interpret as the never ending financial challenge that is my life I asked George, “ Isn't that supposed to be the result of therapy, that someday you don’t need it?” All the while thinking... "God don't we get to the place where we don't have to revisit the same challenges and lessons over and over again?"

And as quickly as I chimed in I checked back out, lost in the thoughts of when will I have some financial peace. Why me? Why poor pitiful me? Only to hear momentarily George say that what he ended up talking to his therapist about was being shown a playboy centerfold at age 8 by his stepfather, and how tragic that was, and how it screwed him up. Inside I went ballistic.

Are you kidding me, the tragedy of the century is being shown a Playboy? Earlier than that I was manipulated into an actual sex act. I went on to vent that why do we sit around and blame, and find excuses about all kinds of crap. It happens, it happened to me, I am not what happened, I am the decisions I make today. In many ways I was saying, George you don’t have problems… I have problems… but I don’t have problems because there are many more that have much bigger problems than I do.

I asked George, “Do you think my son is being screwed up because his mother has moved him from home to home and school to school 5 times before he is eight?” Do you think it is screwing him up to have her move in with boyfriend after boyfriend?”

His face showed complete concern, compassion, and love for the pain I was expressing and his reply was a simple, “yes.”

And it hit me… In that moment I realized what the lost loans, the revisited lessons were about. They were about trusting God, and I said, “There is not a damn thing I can do about how my son’s mother raises him, all I can do is trust God and be the best example I can be when I have him.” I went on to share what I was seeing spiritually. And at the end someone said, “whenever I find myself going back to old patterns it prevents me from being loved.”

That was it. I was in what I perceived as an old pattern. And the “old pattern” the lost loans that I had counted before they closed made me wonder why God did not love me. The trial made me wonder what sin was preventing God’s blessing. But reality is that I was preventing myself from seeing God’s love in the lesson. I was not trusting that He will provide in November, just like he has provided for me these 576 months preceding. His plan is for a future in eternity.

The crisis is just part of the lesson in learning to trust God. It is just another opportunity to surrender something more over to Him. The crisis is not the cross that Christ says we must take up, it is the preparation. After we have surrendered completely over to Him, then we can gladly take up the cross. In the meantime He loves me in the storm and out of the storm. I simply have to be aware and rest in that.