Wonderful Aching

My husband has been on his annual training with the National Guard for 9 days now and there are still 5 more days to go. He has been away for so long and not being with him has been torture! I knew I would miss him but I had no idea it would feel like this. I feel as if my whole being is slowly tearing in two. In my head I think I am doing ok because I talk to him on the phone (thank God for Cell phones) everyday. We also send each other pictures (thank God for phones with cameras!) everyday too. Nevertheless, the aching and longing inside what I can only call my heart is never satisfied. There is something about his voice coupled with the things he says to me and the way he talks to me that always draws me into his arms. To never be able to satify that drawing is only causing the ache to grow. Its like a (dare I say it?) physical addiction and it is affecting every other part of me. I frequently feel like I am forgetting something - in truth I am missing something - or more accurately, someone. I can't seem to remember the simplest things and at the end of the day I can't recall all the ways I spent my time. I know I had my sister over last week. What day was that? What did we do while she was here? I spent the whole time waiting for his call at the end of the day. The first few days were not too bad. It was like waiting for him to get home from work on a saturday - only he never did, and still hasn't. Yesterday evening I thought of him in prayer and realized that the longing I felt for him was nothing compared to the longing that Jesus feels for us, His Bride. Gary said that his arms ache to hold me. Can you imagine the aching of the arms of God to hold us? I know beyond all things that the love and romance that God created in the art of this world is a reflection of His own heart and that every relationship reveals something of the truth of it. If so, then the aching tearing longing wonderful pain that I feel in being away from my husband is but a reflection and revelation of the truth of the aching longing that Jesus experiences all the time awaiting the day when He will be united with us forever. The joy and satisfaction and pleasure that we bring to Him even though we cannot see each other or physically hold each other just makes us fall deeper in love with Him as we hear the things He speaks to our hearts in tenderness and adoration. Yes, the Son of God adores us! We are adorable to Him! He sees our hearts, hears our voice and it endears us to Him. In the same way, if we will listen to His heart and and hear the love that is spoken in so many ways (including in word) His heart and His tenderness will draw us in to deeper love with Him.
I also realized that no matter what imperfections I see in myself, my husband still is delighted with me. I enjoyed bringing delight to my husband and thought about how much delight we must bring to the Father. He knows our weaknesses and our failures and yet there is something about us that holds His affections that goes deeper than failure and is strnger than our weaknesses. He loves us and He sees us like no one else can. You think you know the darkness of your heart, He sees darkness you don't even know about yet. Still, His love for us is unshakable. He knows we will betray Him. He knows that in our pride we will defy Him and insist we are our own ruler. He knows that we have been twisted and perverted by the world we live in and that we will choose many times to sin rather than surrender. He also knows that we long to be good, to be just, to be like Him. We long to please Him and be with Him, to embrace Him and return the love He so lavishly gives. It is this part of us, this part that says YES to His love that He responds to. It is all that matters to Him. All that other stuff - the darkness - can be dealt with. Is there a YES in our heart? This is what draws Him to us and opens ourselves to His hand. This is what ravishes His heart.
I am not perfect. I do not love perfectly. My husband is not perfect either nor does he love perfectly. Father is perfect and loves perfectly and He has given us this love with which we can love each other. This love looks at the darkness and sees it as changeable and looks at the light and sees it as unchangeable and increasing.
Yes, my arms ache to hold my husband and be held by him once again. This aching is wonderful. It tells me that my heart is truely his. No one else can satisfy this aching. Father has a wonderful ache. His heart is truely ours and no one else can satisfy that ache.

My place

There is great benefit to just being with someone. I love that my husband and I can be together all the time now that we are married. I mean, of course, we have to go to work everyday but from the very moment we wake up, we are together. When we come home from work, we are together. Neither of us has to drive any given amout to get to the other and we never have to say good bye in order to say good night. It's a wonderful thing after so many months of our engagement spent parting company each night.

Every night when we get home we take a few minutes just to embrace and let the day wash away. Sometimes it only takes a few moments. Other times it seems to take forever to get my heart to come home and rest. So much of the business of the day attaches itself to me and begins to leach out the life that I long to hoard for our time together. When I find my spot, that place in his arms I begin to relax and those cares and worries and distractions drop off and melt away. Once again I am home and the things that matter the most regain their rightful position.

This is what time with Father does too. Did you know that there is a special place in His heart just for you? Your own spot? And whenever you want you can go to that spot and He will embrace you and I guarantee that if you stay there long enough the cares and worries and distractions of life will drop off of you and His love will wash them away. You can find your place in the Heart of God. Just take the time to embrace Him and be still.

Psalm 46:10 tells us to do just that - to be still and know that He is God. Being still is difficult but we must contend for it! For it is in that secret place of stillness that He will reveal Himself to us. He longs for us to know Him deeper and more intimately. He desires for our relationship to grow. Just as my relationship with my Husband began as friendship, warmed into companionship and boiled into intimacy, so God desires that the friendship He shares with His people become something more - something deeper - something far more intimate. He longs to share His heart with His beloved. What a concept when you understand that YOU are that beloved one! Be still and know.

Know that He is God. This has so often meant to me that He wants me to see how big He is and how powerful He is so that I won't have to be worried or afraid. But now it goes much deeper. He is God and God is the lover of my soul. God is my Creator and the One who cherishes me as His own. God is my Father Who loves me, His daughter. His heart is toward me. It is vital to know this. This gives me life. This gives me purpose. This gives me peace and rest. What good is it to know how powerful He is if I do not believe that He would use that power on my behalf? How many damsels in distress, turmoil and danger are comforted into peace and hope simply by the arrival of their hero? Every single one of them that knows they are loved by that Hero.

So relax. Take the time to be still.
And stay there until you are finally at home in the heart of God.

April 15, 2006

Utterly Incapable

I am realizing more and more how utterly incapable we are of bringing about freedom in our own lives. Today I sat in utter astounding amazement and although it may contain slight echoes of pride I will share this freely. (After all exposing pride to the light is fatal to pride.) Change began to happen in front of me - change that I had nothing to do with. I was so happy and so swept away by the power on display. I am not sure that it wasn't just the effects of change that were sweeping me off my feet. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I didn't try hard or focus or walk through fifteen steps. It just happened right in front of me - before my very eyes. Proof once again that the work of God in our lives is just that - the work of God. Like the song says - "You're the God and I'm the man". How relieving it is to have that revelation. Yet the question Peter put so perfectly remains. How then should we live? Certainly there is a place of humility and submission to Him wherein these workings of power flow freely. I know that rebellion in my heart - that insistance that I know the way above what God is speaking into my life - can not only hinder but will halt the flow. Otherwise, its like trying to feed a child that won't stop talking. You have to hush the chid in order to feed him. Then again, sometimes the best way to hush a child is to stick something good in his mouth! I think God does each. Somethimes He wants us to quiet our selves, to lay aside our own thoughts and opinions and what we think is true and surrender to Him and to His truth. To let our pride die and open ourselves to receive fresh bread. Then there are other times when right in the middle of saying something the Spirit of God intervenes in his mercy and rescues me from a deceit or wrong opinion by exploding his truth in my heart and bubbling it up right out of my own mouth. This just happened last week. I was speaking with a friend of mine about anger and began to say things to her that were actually ministering to my own heart. Things I knew were not from myself and things that I knew were from God because there was power in them and I was getting free. Wow. So, I don't put anything past God. I do not pretend to know how He works or why He does what He does. I do know this, He is good and all His ways are love.

Redemptive Suffering

The Bride of Christ needs to learn how to receive mistreatment - how not to have to defend herself. God is her husband and defender. Mistreatment can be seen as "redemptive suffering" which should not be despised - it counts for something. God will use it to form and mold us - exposing weaknesses and faultlines. Mistreatment is a test which contains an avenue of transformation - it takes you to a place of "leaning on your Lover" Not defending myself - an opportunity to lean on Jesus and let Him purge my soul of weaknesses. There is something better than being right in life - being free from pride and dying to self-protection.