Please don't be fooled by my bright and colorful instagram photos - this creative outlet is precisely the distraction I need to redirect my heavy heart, and unlike my blog, it's not the appropriate medium to be very vulnerable. I value authenticity, so to balance my highly curated content on instagram, I feel compelled to honestly disclose, here, how God's been challenging me.
Since Tuesday, I've continued to mull over three things my spiritual mentor shared:
1. If you met someone on the street, you'd hesitate to entrust them with your most valuable possession. Take a casual friend and maybe you'd trust them... But you feel most comfortable trusting a close friend. How can you confidently trust God if you don't really know who He is? Have you taken the time to get to know God?
2. If we don't believe that God cares and will tend to the little things, how can we believe that He will provide for us in big ways? (Matthew 6)
3. Feeling angry is not a sin. God gives us feelings for a reason. Have you ever been wronged? Where does that sense of injustice come from? Where does our expectation for justice come from? Feeling angry is not a sin, but acting on that anger is.
So much has felt like a request for a favor that I don't have the capacity to extend. God, how much more can I give? Why can't I receive? I'm exhausted, hurt, overwhelmed, stressed out of my mind. I feel taken advantage of; I feel wronged. Why can't someone else be the one to step up? Why do you ask me to forgive twice as hard without receiving an apology? Why does this school, this career path, take everything out of me and give nothing back? Why does my past continue to hurt me today?
Reminders to transform every anxiety to prayer, every hint of resentment to confession, have revealed my weakness and helped me see God's might and goodness all the better. God's given me a lot of strength to show grace and forgiveness, even through the experience of asking for forgiveness, yet I've continued to struggle with frustration. I still feel wronged. How is it, that a God who lavishes undeserved grace and calls us to be gracious, is also just, righteous, fair?
"The wisdom of God has ordained a way for the love of God to deliver us from the wrath of God without compromising the justice of God. There it is. The gospel. Let me say it again slowly: The wisdom of God has ordained a way for the love of God to deliver us from the wrath of God without compromising the justice of God."
I still don't fully understand this seemingly dichotomous-yet-divinely-practical logic. Yet what I do know is that on the day of reckoning, when all chaos cedes to long-awaited order, when our Heavenly Father brings His plans to absolute completion, our hunger for righteousness to reign will be satisfied. Our God asks us to walk humbly and mercifully, but He is also just. He also cares about our hurt, and we can absolutely dump it all into His capable hands. Give it up and let Him deal with it. Continue to show patience and use God's word to correct, teach, and build up in love. It's funny how God can present our sinfulness in our pursuit of holiness. In our search for justice, our sense of right and wrong simultaneously reveals our limitations and shortcomings.
So to you, God, as I longingly await your justice, I seek your grace. I surrender the tears I bite back, my external stillness and peacefulness that others glorify and I battle to reconcile, the inherent sinfulness of my ocpd, my undying need for control, my idolization of perfection, my foolish self-righteousness, my crippling rigidity, my very human nature wrought with years of anxiety and insomnia and panic attacks. I come before you, thrusting my palms open, pleading that You use my brokenness to show me more of who You are.
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