God Hears

           Sometimes it is difficult to be vulnerable. I can imagine I’m not the only one who has experienced this. It can be so easy to act like you're fine all the time, and act like you’re not actually falling apart on the inside. Today, I am writing in this state… I am vulnerable. I am confused, broken, lonely, and weak. I am on my last straw, wondering what event will come next in my life to break me even more.

 As much as this feeling totally sucks, there is beauty in it. When I’m broken, when I’ve given up on all the worldly things that fail me, I have a God who is immovable and will never fail me. I have a God who is greater and bigger than any experience I go through. When everything seems to be going wrong, I have a God who will find me exactly where I am. When I am vulnerable and broken, my God is strong. He’s waiting to reach out to me, as soon as He hears my cry. Psalm 18:6 says,

“In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried to my God for help; He heard my voice out of His temple, and my cry for help came into His ears.”

No matter how broken I am, I am never outside the realm of God’s mercy and grace. All I have to do is let go of my own strength and humbly fall before Him. Tenth Avenue North perfectly states this feeling of vulnerability and humbling our broken hearts before God:

I'm on my knees
Begging You to notice me
I'm on my knees
Father, will You turn to me, yeah?

One tear in the dropping rain
One voice in a sea of pain
Could the Maker of the stars
Hear the sound of my breaking heart?

One life is all I am
Right now I can barely stand
If You're everything You say You are
Would You come close and hold my heart?

Read more: Tenth Avenue North - Hold My Heart Lyrics | MetroLyrics 

      If you ever feel as if your pain and struggles are insignificant and don’t matter, I promise you that they do. God hears your cry and sees your pain. He knows what you’re struggling with, and He is waiting for you to give it up and find Him. In your darkest hour, God isn’t going to run away and hide from you because He doesn’t want to deal with your struggles. Instead, if you let Him, He will fix you. He will hold your heart and catch your tears. All the pain you feel now will be so small in the face of God’s presence.

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Embrace your pain and struggles and know that God is listening to your cries. He will hear you, and in time when He does, it will become your turn to listen. 

"Good Enough"

            The other day someone told me they didn’t feel good enough for God’s love. I hear this type of thing more often than I would like, but sometimes I even feel this way myself. In our society, we have it in our heads that we have to qualify, we have to meet a certain standard, or we have to be this way or that way to be accepted. And to be honest, it really sucks sometimes. Especially as a perfectionist, I often battle with the fact that sometimes no matter how hard I try, I just can’t quite make the cut.

            It’s not necessarily a bad thing to want to be better and the best you can be, but it can become a bad thing when you become obsessed with this. It becomes a bad thing when the thought starts to haunt you that you won’t be good enough, that you can’t be perfect, that you might not meet the standards or qualifications. At least that’s the way this world seems to function sometimes.

            However, I am so joyously grateful that God doesn’t function this way. His love goes beyond the idea of being “good enough” and meets you right where you are. Isn’t it amazing and relieving to know that we don’t have to qualify for God’s love? He just loves us because he chooses to. He loves us because our God is love, that’s who he is. And He chose us before we were even capable of even trying to qualify.

Not only did God choose us as His and love us for exactly who we are even with our flaws, imperfections, and shortcomings, but He is still working in us. So what if we aren’t good enough??? Our God is MORE than good enough and when we allow Him to be a part of our lives, we become good in Him. 

Take me Back to En Gedi (poem)

 Take Me Back to En Gedi

Take me back to En Gedi

Where your Living Water flows

Where it was easy to find you, to hear you, to seek you

Take me back through the desert

So my wandering hearts breaks

So the eyes of my soul open

So I’m completely lost until I find your face

I desperately know that I need you desperately

But the things of this world won’t let me escape

Like David found En Gedi

Where Living Water overflowed

Lead me back to your embrace

Take me back to En Gedi

Bring me down to my knees

My heart is drying up quickly

Let your love wash over me

Lead me to your waterfall

I’ll dive as deep as I can

So I can immerse myself in your grace

And be near you once again

This dry and barren land

Is getting the best of me

God I need your Living Water

Rain down your love on me

Take me back to En Gedi

I’m ready to hike

I’m prepared to be broken

I’m ready to fight

To fight against my weary soul

To run from all that holds me back

To humble myself before your throne

If that’s what it takes to be brought back 

Back into your promised home

Oh Abba, Living Water

Forgive me for my wrongs

Cleanse me once again in your waterfall

Take me back to En Gedi

Now my sins are no more

My savior has freed me

I can swim in your love once more

Living Water I need you

Not just now but always

I’ll follow you through the desert

Through the valley through the storm 

Through the wadi to En Gedi

Where Living Water flows

I could stay here forever

In my Abba’s waterfall

Take Me Back to En Gedi

          After going to Israel and learning what it really feels like to hike through the desert and find a waterfall in what seems like the middle of nowhere, I’ve been in love with the concept of God being our ‘Living Water’ and how our souls should always thirst for Him. The following quotes are from one of my favorite songs by Chris Tomlin, called “Waterfall.”

“You’re more than I could long for, I thirst for you.”

“Your love is like a waterfall raining down on me.”

“Oh God, my God I seek you, in this dry and desert land.”

“You’re an ocean to my soul.”

“It’s coming like a flood, I’m dancing in the rain, everything I’ve done, is covered in rivers of grace.”  

("Waterfall Lyrics." CHRIS TOMLIN LYRICS. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Feb. 2015.)

Now think back to a time when you pushed yourself through a really intense workout and felt like you might collapse if you couldn’t get a drink of water. Try and remember a time when your mouth was dry, and the only thing on your mind was getting just one little sip of water. Imagine yourself hiking through a desert in 110 degree weather, not having any water. And if being thirsty for water isn’t something you can really connect with, then think of something you’ve longed for or desperately wanted for so long. Maybe you’re an athlete and what you’ve always wanted was to one day set Olympic world records. Maybe there’s some place you want to travel to and you’ve been saving up to go there your whole life. Or maybe you lost someone very close to you and the only thing that you truly desire is to see them again. Whatever it is, everyone longs, desires, or thirsts for something.

            This waterfall concept is that the one desire for our hearts, should be for the one that gave us breath, gave us life, and gave us souls in the first place. We should be so desperately thirsty for God, that we will do whatever it takes to get closer to him. Too often we become somewhat satisfied with the ‘water’ this world gives us. We settle for worldly things, rather than seeking our God, who can sustain us completely with his Living Water.

           

 “For my people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” –Jeremiah 2:13

            The only thing that will ever truly satisfy one’s soul completely, can only be found in God. Sometimes it takes us to wander around in the desert awhile until we realize that all along God was waiting right there, ready to sustain us with his Living Water.

When I was in Israel, I had the opportunity to hike through the desert to an oasis called En Gedi. (Ein Gedi). After wandering and hiking around for hours, the last thing I thought I would see was a beautiful waterfall. But then there it was, and that moment inspired me to write the following poem…

                                                       Take Me Back to En Gedi

Take me back to En Gedi

Where your Living Water flows

Where it was easy to find you, to hear you, to seek you

Take me back through the desert

So my wandering hearts breaks

So the eyes of my soul open

So I’m completely lost until I find your face

I desperately know that I need you desperately

But the things of this world won’t let me escape

Like David found En Gedi

Where Living Water overflowed

Lead me back to your embrace

Take me back to En Gedi

Bring me down to my knees

My heart is drying up quickly

Let your love wash over me

Lead me to your waterfall

I’ll dive as deep as I can

So I can immerse myself in your grace

And be near you once again

This dry and barren land

Is getting the best of me

God I need your Living Water

Rain down your love on me

Take me back to En Gedi

I’m ready to hike

I’m prepared to be broken

I’m ready to fight

To fight against my weary soul

To run from all that holds me back

To humble myself before your throne

If that’s what it takes to be brought back

Back into your promised home

Oh Abba, Living Water

Forgive me for my wrongs

Cleanse me once again in your waterfall

Take me back to En Gedi

Now my sins are no more

My savior has freed me

I can swim in your love once more

Living Water I need you

Not just now but always

I’ll follow you through the desert

Through the valley through the storm

Through the wadi to En Gedi

Where Living Water flows

I could stay here forever

In my Abba’s waterfall

How do we become thirsty for only God in a world with so many other distractions? Honestly, I’m still working on that every day. It is always going to be a battle deciding what you truly desire in life and what is really important. However, I will say that the more chances you get to satisfy your soul with Living Water, the more you realize that nothing else will ever be able to sustain you the way that only God can. Also, remember that sometimes feeling like your trapped in a desert isn’t such a bad thing. Usually, this is where you finally realize that there’s a waterfall right around the corner waiting for you to jump in and experience God’s love.

                           “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” -Psalm 42:2

Time to Let the Worry Go

                I grew up out in the country, surrounded by fields and big open areas for the scary creatures of the night to wander and roam. Ok… so I guess it’s not really that scary, but when I would lay in bed at night, there were many times when I would hear strange noises coming from right outside my window. Sometimes I would hear coyotes which used to freak me out, sometimes I would hear cats hissing at each other, and sometimes I would hear our outdoor guard dog, Buddy, barking.

                Now why would I be scared of my own dog barking? It wasn’t because I was scared of the dog himself, but I was scared because I didn’t know what he was barking at. He could be barking at robbers trying to break into our house, he could be barking at someone peeking in through my window, or maybe he was just barking at the stray cat that ran across the yard. But what really worried me whenever Buddy barked at night, was that I had no clue what he was barking at. I didn’t know what was outside. So rather than being encouraged by the fact that Buddy was doing his job by being a good guard dog, I was often a little frightened only because I had no idea what he was barking at. I spent too much time worrying about what I didn’t know, rather than being thankful for what I did know: that my dog was out there to protect our house.  

                Many times we are afraid and worry for no reason, when in reality, God is in complete control. We worry and worry and worry, when God is really working the whole time. But why worry about the unknown when we have a God who already knows it all? We should spend more time being thankful for what we do know—that God is always in control.   

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” –Philippians 4:6

God makes it pretty clear that it isn’t our job to worry. As hard as it can be sometimes, we just have to let it go and have faith that God is in control.  As Martin Luther phrased it, “Pray, and let God worry.”