✌🏼I Was Blind… But Now I See (Again)
What If Your Struggle Is God Answering Your Prayers?
God is doing something new in me. I'm seeing things so clearly... it hurts!!! Now I know why we faced all this struggle. Why we had to nearly lose everything. I wanted to change the world, but all along, God was just changing me. Answering my prayers to be like Jesus. Refining my love for both the least of these and the blindest hypocrite.
You don't know what you don't know. So many layers of fleshly desires to get through. Years of weekly fasting. Daily, honest reflection morning and evening. Praying for the harvest. Seeking the Kingdom with reckless abandon. Learning not to worry about stuff. Giving until we were beyond broke. Gut-wrenching accountability among trusted Jesus followers. Seeing the church we worked and sacrificed to plant essentially crumble. None of it made any sense.
As we seemed to be hanging on by financial and logistical threads, over and over I kept hearing, "Seek the Kingdom. Don't ask. Be faithful." Even that didn't make total sense. Yet even in my weakness and in my many failures, by the grace of God, I believe my goals and heart were in the right direction. All I want is to love God with everything, love people like Jesus, and go make disciples like He commanded.
And all this time, Jesus was discipling me. Conforming me into His image, not my ambition. Killing the pride, selfishness, I couldn't even see. Now I can see more clearly. As we were packing up to move, I heard, "I'm giving your smile back." Honestly, I thought that was about getting my teeth fixed. My smile has been embarrassing for years. Yet it was about my heart. My joy. My peace. Which isn't mine at all. Nothing is. It's all His. It's all Him. Or it's nothing.
Then suddenly. Sitting alone at the coffee shop... trying to hide the tears from the baristas... God did a heart transplant. I was blind. Part of the miracle happened more than a decade ago, but I could only partially see... people still looked like trees. Now I can see. It started inside. Seeing the hurt. Seeing how I took things personally with myopic "righteous" indignation. Justifying bitterness. Becoming what I hated so much. But that's not who I am.
I am born again–from above. In earth as it is in heaven. A new creation. Old things are dead. What's new has come. Today. Not a theory or a theology. Just Jesus. Jesus in me. The fellowship of His sufferings. Not so I can qualify as some kind of martyr. Simply to, by faith and through trials and struggle, put to death my disqualifying flesh to walk in His love. This has been my life verse since I was a kid. It has come to mean more and more over the years. But today, it's real. It's tangible. It's happening.
Galatians 2:20 (NET)
I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Dozens of verses like these and of course, the Words of Jesus are now taking on more and more depth of understanding. Not the information, but the practical application.
1 Corinthians 9:27 (NET)
Instead I subdue my body and make it my slave, so that after preaching to others I myself will not be disqualified.
1 Corinthians 10:12 (NET)
So let the one who thinks he is standing be careful that he does not fall.
James 1:12-14 (NET)
12 Happy is the one who endures testing, because when he has proven to be genuine, he will receive the crown of life that God promised to those who love him. 13 Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. 14 But each one is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires.
My own desires. Now I understand why I kept hearing, "Don't ask..."
James 4:1-3 (NET)
1 Where do the conflicts and where do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this, from your passions that battle inside you? 2 You desire and you do not have; you murder and envy and you cannot obtain; you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask; 3 you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so you can spend it on your passions.
The Good News? Grace is instantaneous. I'm pressing forward, not dwelling on past mistakes. In my weakness, He is strong. I can't count the number of times I prayed Philippians 3 & 4. With all my failures. All my pride. I can honestly say that my overall heart's desire, from childhood, even in the prodigal wildernesses, was to just know Jesus like this.
Philippians 3:10-14 (NET)
10 My aim is to know him, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
12 Not that I have already attained this - that is, I have not already been perfected - but I strive to lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus also laid hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have attained this. Instead I am single-minded: Forgetting the things that are behind and reaching out for the things that are ahead, 14 with this goal in mind, I strive toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
If you or your feelings have been victims of my weakness or failures, I'm deeply sorry and ask for your forgiveness. Why post about things like this? I choose to follow Jesus publicly, not to be noticed but in hopes that both my successes and struggles will help someone else come to know Jesus.
He is wonderful. His abundant life is real. His Kingdom isn't just a pie in the sky. It's here and now among those who have denied themselves to follow Jesus. And I'm living proof that if you hunger and thirst for righteousness, He will show up, not just for you, but in you. The evidence? Love. Agape love. Perfect love that casts out all fear. The "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do" kind of love. Not, "Father fix them..."
Doctrines, dogma, and man's institutions and traditions will let you down. Jesus is enough. He is the Way. The truth. The life. I want everyone to know Jesus like He has graciously allowed me to know Him. It's His love in us and through us that proves who He is. Not our arguments or "right" understandings.
Without that love, nothing else matters. Jesus, thank you for loving me enough to not make it easy. Your Way is better.
And now, for Your glory, not to meet my needs or for my own desires... give us today our daily bread.
I get it! Similar testimony! He will restore you!