30 Day Prayer Challenge Day 21, October 19, 2014 “Both riches and honor come from You, and You rule over all, and in Your hand is power and might; and it lies in Your hand to make great and to strengthen everyone.” 1 Chronicles 29:12 One of the most poignant poems for me is, “Footprints in the Sand.” My interpretation is a little different though. If I were to look back over my life, like the poem, there were times when there was only one set of footprints. Unfortunately, they were mine because I chose to walk without Him. I would make all my decisions independent of His plan for me and then when things didn’t go so well, I’d get mad that it wasn’t His footprints in the sand – just mine. I have been discovering, though, that He uses everything, including my refusal to let Him carry me. Somebody wrote a similar version: One night I had a wondrous dream. One set of footprints there was seen… the footprints of my precious Lord, but mine were not along the shore. But then some stranger prints appeared, and I asked the Lord, “What have we here? Those prints are large and round and neat, but Lord, they are too big for feet.” “My child,” He said in somber tones, “for miles I carried you alone. I challenged you to walk in faith, but you refused and made me wait. You disobeyed, you would not grow, the walk of faith, you would not know.” “So I got tired, I got fed up. And there I dropped you on your butt.” “Because in life, there comes a time, when one must fight, and one must climb, when one must rise and take a stand, or leave their butt prints in the sand.” So many months went by. After Heather’s funeral I tried desperately, but could not pull the pieces of my life back together. Every time I attempted to get back into the normal routine of my life, grief pushed back and wiped me out for awhile. I wrestled with “why.” It was a familiar question. And I knew from experience that I probably wouldn’t get the answers this side of Heaven. This round of “why’s” though, came with a truckload of fear that I had caused her death. If He loved me, wouldn’t He do anything to save me? Would it have been more loving to let me walk away from His side, or to allow this trauma to pass through His hands, yet sustaining me at every difficult step? Heather was safe in the arms of Jesus. I was ready to run from them. Whether her death was divine discipline or my guilty mind was primed to receive it as such, He let me feel the weight of who would be hurt the most if I continued to stick my toes over the line of temptation. I couldn’t live with that. It was time to stop getting “hits” from anybody but God and Scott. Hello road of faith! Meet the rubber of my prayer-life! I wanted to be convinced that He was real. If He really loved me, I wanted to know that He loved me, Terry Apple, and not just some nameless face in the sea of humanity as He looked down unsympathetically from His heavenly throne. If His Son really did come here to earth and die on a cross, then I wanted to understand what that really meant and why it was supposed to matter to me so much more than it did. Why, if He was my answer, was I drowning in questions? I determined to take time with God every morning, no matter how I felt when I woke up. I decided my morning routine with God would involve reading something in Scripture (ANYTHING in Scripture), and then talking to Him (about ANYTHING). There were no limits to what I would talk about with Him. He knew it all anyway. I refused to make my time with Him any more complicated than this. The goal was only to purposely step into His presence every day. I was always aware that I could talk to Him, but now I wanted to know Him, and not just send up my requests. Things started changing. God began showing me why I was struggling profoundly with temptations and life in general. No temptation overtook me that isn’t “common to man,” but up to that point, I wasn’t relying on Him to make a way out. My last-minute cries for help never worked. It’s not that He turned a deaf ear, but He will not override my stubborn choice to willfully try making it on my own. Instead of rescuing me from the chaos I create by doing that, He lets me live in the tension of wanting more from Him. It makes me angry in the short-term, when I don’t see the Almighty Vending Machine produce what I just pushed the button for. The long-term is where He’s wants to see change, though. What a shallow spiritual life I would have if I was handed spiritual “Twinkies” every time I pushed the God-button in my last-minute acknowledgement of my hunger for Him, passing up all the opportunities to have an actual meal that would have sustained me. I hate Twinkies! When I eat real food, I don’t even want them. He wants to do so much more for and through His people than we allow Him to do. Our power comes through surrendering to His power. His strength comes in its fullness when we are weak and surrendered. It’s then that we know that the glory isn’t ours when He uses us. He wants to show us who He is right now in 2014. He needs us to be surrendered to His plan. More tomorrow. Scripture of the Day: “O taste and see that the Lord is good; How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!” Psalm 34:8 Song of the Day: “What if,” by Nicole Nordman youtube/watch?v=rUhnoralqVA
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 20:12:12 +0000
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