Last night on our way home from softball practice our soon to be eleven year old was discussing her last days as a ten year old. She said (and I kid you not), “This is my last week to be ten years old. You know ten is such a great age! It’s the first time you are in double digits. It’s the first time you have a zero after the year in your age. I just need to do something crazy this week while I’m still ten. I just need to really LIVE IT! I know! I’m going to do handstands until I get one to stay up. I’m almost there! I can feel it!”
I admire her zeal for life. As a thirty-eight year old woman with, what seems at times, like a lifetime of regrets that like to drag behind me, an overwhelming set of present circumstances that like to constantly remind me that life is mostly hard, and an uncertain future ahead of me that likes to remind of my past regrets and present circumstances so that it can instigate me to fear in making any type of choices because I am fully aware of how devastating the wrong and unwise choice can be… Here lately I have simply rarely found myself saying, I just need to really LIVE IT.
It’s been really bad the past several years. I have felt like I fell in a pit and became surrounded by darkness and death crept into my spirit one little bit at a time. The once wide eyed excitement I had for the mystery and beauty of the body of Christ became one of cynicism and no longer trusting anyone.
I had been lied to too many times. I had carried the weight of broken promises for too long. I had walked so far in the confusion of duality that I wondered if I would ever come out of the fog and find that clear simple, yet narrow, path again. The one that was proven.
As I am taking a break from social media and digging deeper and deeper into the book of Jeremiah I am being reminded of and restored to the joy of my salvation. As I read this past week of the Shantung Revival and read the testimonies of some of the missionaries involved, my heart, for the first time in a while, has began to stir.
I am being reminded of who I KNOW my God to be.
Ah Lord God! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and by Your outstretched arm! Nothing is too difficult for You, who shows lovingkindness to thousands, but repays the iniquity of fathers into the bosom of their children after them, O great and mighty God. The Lord of hosts is His name; great in counsel and mighty in deed, whose eyes are open to all the ways of the sons of men, giving to everyone according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds; who has set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and even to this day both in Israel and among mankind; and You have made a name for Yourself, as at this day.
Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying, “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh; is anything too difficult for Me?”
Jeremiah 32:17-20, 26-27
Bottom line. Is anything too difficult for my God?
No. Nothing is too difficult for God.
How easily we forget who He is and begin to limit Him to our own personal understanding of Him, even if that personal understanding is Biblically accurate. His attributes, His power, His purposes are not limited to His revealed word. He is, even still, so much more.
We must never take away from Him anything that He has revealed or change anything about Him that He has revealed, but we also cannot and must not place Him in the box of our own understanding of what He has revealed.
He says nothing is too difficult for Him. Nothing.
He is the Creator and Sustainer of the entire universe. He is the God of all flesh. He is the One who breathes life into everything that has life. He is the One who controls the times and the epochs. He decides the rising and setting of the sun and makes it stand still if He wants to… even if its one of us, His created, who asks Him to do it.
“Thus says the Lord who made the earth, the Lord who formed it to establish it, the Lord is His name, ‘Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’
Jeremiah 33:2-3
I am learning again in my heart who my God is. As I sank into my pit I clung to His Word. I clung to the truth that I knew of Him. I carried out the truths I had learned, the steps that I recognized, I kept to the path that I could see, even though I have often questioned if I was just flat out lost. I have held fast to the hem of His garment that I was able to catch a glimpses of in the mass of chaos. I have clung to Him even though it appeared to me that I felt nothing in spirit. I know His Word is true and I know eventually He will bring me through this valley back into His presence on the mountain top. I am not there yet. I still walk in the valley of the shadow of death. I am still wondering and wandering in the wilderness, but I know my wondering and wandering is not without purpose. I have come to the waters of Marah and behold, my God has revealed the tree, the Lord my Healer is in the process of making these bitter waters sweet.
This life is short… and every moment… every day is a great gift from our God… so let’s really LIVE IT!