September 27, 2018

The Place Inside Myself

There is a place we sometimes live that can become very fearful or very sorrowful.  It can taunt us with its irrationality or its oppressive consumption.  Biblical truth is nebulous at best, and as believers, we scorn ourselves that we have secluded ourselves there – again – wrapped in its loneliness, our thinking and our beliefs muddled in confusion.  It’s the cocoon that can wrap itself slowly around us or we can run to the false security of its isolation very abruptly.  I call it, “the place inside myself.”  It is a place the biblical psalmist retreated to with his groanings, his weaknesses, and his agony.  He could be sick at heart or worn out with sobbing.  He could feel attacked, persecuted, or hated – and he could detail all the reasons for why he was living inside himself – just as we can.  In the haze of his thinking though, he never let go of the truth that God knew and God loved, and that he was the object of God’s understanding knowledge and God’s compassionate love.  

Over and over again in the Old Testament, God declares His love for His covenant people.  It is a love that embraces too those who are part of the new covenant of grace, and that includes us.   I have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love.  With unfailing love, I have drawn you to myself.  Jesus Himself says to us, “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me.”  I cannot begin to comprehend the depth, the breadth, the height, or the intensity of God’s love for the One who is part of His own nature, His only Son, the One in whom He takes absolute delight.  And yet, it is a love of that same magnitude and intensity that Jesus gives to us!  Me – with all my imperfections.  Me – secluded in that place within myself.  But not just me – His love is for you, even when your thinking and your emotions run rampant, and leave Him out.  

God knows though, not only when we seclude ourselves, but He knows that to stay there will infect every facet of my being and my doing.  His desire is to lift me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire, and to set my feet on solid ground and steady me as I walk along.  He wants to give me a new song to sing, a hymn of praise to my God, so that many will see what He has done.  For that to happen, I must invite Him in to my place within myself.  I must be honest with Him and open to the change He is able to bring.  I may need to find someone who is “God-with-skin-on” and invite them in as well.  God works that way, even when I would rather stay in my cocoon.  “The place inside myself” stifles my freedom and my growth, and much more.  Some of us go there more quickly than others, but nonetheless, believing in what God has for me, I must listen for His presence at the door, and invite Him in.

                                                                                     – Bev 

(Related Bible reading: Psalm 40:1-5)