You close your eyes and sigh deeply.  When you open your eyes, the city is gone.  Jesus is gone.  Wait, you feel Him near you.  As you slowly turn toward that light that was leading you away from the city, you feel Him more.  He is that Light.  You know it now, but you grieve for the vision you have lost.  The funnel has again been placed around you sight and you can only see the path illuminated ahead of you.  You have a new excitement, a new love for the Light.  You know where it is leading you and you are excited to get going.  You follow the light, not even looking to your right or left.  You know if you follow the light, you will find the city, you will be with Jesus!  The path is clear and clean and well illuminated.  You are enjoying the journey.  The vision of Jesus is close in your mind and it is feeding you along the way.  He is your sustenance.  He is your Joy.

Boy and horse walked away from me. Seth had the lead rope tightly gripped in his hands, he was stiff and jerky. Emma’s head was high and she was looking around with whites showing in her eyes. She was prancy and twitchy. They both had a fight/flight air about them. As they walked, Emma’s posture slowly relaxed. She dropped her head so her ears were below Seth’s shoulder and began licking and chewing. Her ears drooped and her feet dragged. She became as docile as a 30 y/o kids pony. At the same time, I saw the tension slowly leave my son. The rope loosened in his hand and his shoulders slouched. When he had circled around I looked into his face. The wild-eyes were gone. This is not the first time this has happened.

I told this story to a friend who also had similar problems as Seth in his boyhood. He said that Seth is out of control and knows he’s out of control. He can’t control his own thoughts and is therefore unable to control his behavior. The feeling of complete loss of control is totally overwhelming. When he walked Emma, he was controlling a huge creature. He was put back in control. He was given power to control a force outside of himself and therefore was able to control the wildness inside. I like this explanation. I am very thankful that God creates a link between Himself and us through His creation.

In my previous post, I stated that FAITH is being able to grab a hold of what you can’t feel, but you know is there.  To add to that, FAITH is continuing to live your life even though there are unanswered questions.  The book of Job was the first book of the Bible written.  Why?  It is a book filled with unanswered questions.  It is a frustrating book, because in my mind, Job asks some very good questions.  Most of them boil down to “Why, Lord, are you allowing me to suffer?”  That is really the universal question.  If God is so good, why is there still pain?  Why do I have to live with depression?  Why do I have days that it is a struggle to get out of bed?  Why do some people that drink and smoke their whole life have no health problems when my patient who loves You very much has to suffer through cancer?  Why do young children die?  Why is there starvation in the world?  WHY, WHY, Why?  Add you own list of why’s.  We all have them.  Of all people, Job definitely had a right to ask why.  He was an upright man who even God said of him, “Have you noticed my servant Job? He is the finest man in all the earth. He is blameless—a man of complete integrity. He fears God and stays away from evil.” (Job 1:8) Job suffered as much as any person, except Jesus, has ever suffered.  I think he had a right to ask why.  Did God answer his question?  Did God tell him why he was suffering?  No, He did not.  When I read through Job the first time and came to the heading, “God Answers Job“, I became excited.  Finally, answers to the universal question!  God is going to tell me why we suffer!  But to my great disappointment, God answered with a series of questions of His own.  “Where were you when I created the earth? Did you command the morning to appear?  Can you make it rain?  Can you count the clouds?  Can you make lightning appear? Did you create the creatures of the earth?”  These are rhetorical questions in which God says “I AM WHO I AM and that is all you need to know.”   What was Job’s response?  “I am nothing, how could I ever find the answers? I have said too much already.  I have nothing more to say.” (Job 40:4-5) Job was left with unanswered question to why he was suffering.  But, he was left with the knowledge of God, and that was all he needed.

Christian Reger, a Dachau Survivor, had this to say about his suffering: “Nietzhe said a man can undergo torture if he knows the why of his life, but I, here at Dachau, learned something far greater.  I learned to know the Who of my life.  He was enough to sustain me then, and he is enough to sustain me still.”

Paul was given a “thorn in his flesh” to remind him that it is not about WHY, but about WHO.   “Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away.  Each time he said, ‘My grace is all you need.  My power works best in weakness.’ So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.” (2 Cor 12:6-9) I don’t believe we are told what Paul’s thorn was because we are all given a “thorn” to keep us from becoming proud and to remind us that God is all we need.

So again: to me FAITH is living my life even though it appears to be defined by my pain; continuing on with my responsibilities when I feel I have been let down by God;  waking up each morining and knowing God is with me even though I can’t feel Him; trusting in Him even though it appears hopeless; praying to Him even though I’ve prayed the same thing a million times before.  FAITH is LIVING THROUGH THE PAIN EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE UNASWERED QUESTIONS.

I have always prayed before work.  I pray for my patients I will have during the day.  I pray for myself and the doctors who will see them.  I pray that I will be able to treat each person as I would treat Jesus himself.  The struggle I am having is that I am finding it more and more difficult to see these people through Christ’s eyes.  I am being hardend by repetition.  I look at a young prostitue with missing teeth and scabs all over her face who is sleeping off a meth high and have a hard time seeing the beautiful soul and potential that Jesus sees in her.  It’s hard for me to link someone in crisis with someone who has been there and overcome.

As I was singing in church and struggling with this, a phrase from the song we were singing popped out and struck me.

“It’s your kindness Lord, that leads us to repentance”

Wow.  My eyes were opened.  Being a nurse instantly held new meaning to me.  I have Christ living in me.  Therefore, wherever I go and whatever I do, Jesus is there.  I am his representative.  I am to represent what he would do if he were in physical form here on Earth.  Every time I go into a room and treat a patient as lost, undesirable, and hopeless, I am not sharing Christ.  I am not representing him.  But when I treat them with kindness; as a beautiful child of God in need of a savior, I AM representing Christ.  I am providing hope.  I am providing ”kindness that leads to repentance” and change. The Bible says,

“You may think you can condem such people, but you are just as bad, and you have no excuse!  When you say they are wicked and should be punished, you are condemning yourself, for you who judge others do these very same things. . . Don’t you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you? . . Can’t you see that his kindness is intended to turn you from your sin?” Romans 2:1-4 NLT 

So, I will probably not see the results of my kindness, but I can know that as I am representing Christ, I am planting seeds in my patient’s lives.  As I represent Christ, he will live fuller and fuller in me and it will be easier to SEE through his eyes.  Thank-you Jesus, for letting me be your representative to lost and dying people.

I look at my relationship with God like my relationship with my husband.  I know without a shadow of a doubt that my husband loves me.  Being married is a given.  I no longer have to try to woo him or make him mine; he already is.  So why would I continually go back to courting and worrying if he likes me and if I said the right thing?  What I should be focused on is developing my relationship with him in a deeper and more intimate way.  Unfortunately, my relationship with my husband needs improvement.  Because I know that he loves me unconditionally, I work on all the other little things in my life that seem so pressing because I know that he will still be there no matter what I do.  This is no way to develop an intimate relationship.  No quality time is spent growing and learning about each other.   

I feel the same about my relationship with God.  If I leave Him until the very last, I am too exhausted and my conversations with him consist of dribble.  Or if I give Him what is left over after I pay my bills, then there just isn’t any left to give.  Just as I don’t want my relationship with my husband to grow cold, I surely don’t want my relationship with God to grow cold.  Does a cold relationship mean that I am no longer a Christian or no longer a wife?  Absolutely not.  Does it mean I am not living my life to the fullest?  You bet!  

I do agree that tithe is a sticky issue.  So-called Christian leaders have definitely exploited the concept.  If someone tithes because they feel guilty, then they are doing it for very wrong reasons and are living under legalism, not freedom through grace.  I do not live under guilt.  When I say that I am robbing God, it is not out of fear that I say it, but out of sadness.  I am robbing God of what is His the same way I rob my husband when I do not actively pursue to know him more, or the way I rob my children if I were to plop my butt in front of a movie and only talk to them on commercials.    I am still a wife and still a mother, just not the best I can be.  I don’t want to be just a Christian, but a friend and lover of God and I will do what I think I need to in order to achieve that.   

 But money is not the only thing God wants.  As I was listening to the teaching, I realized that there are two things we never have enough of: Money and Time.  In the same way we give what’s left over of our money to God when all the bills are paid, we give what is left over of our time after all of our tasks and chores are complete, and there is usually none left to give!  So, if God requires my  first-fruits, then He requires the first part of my day as well!  I have gone through periods where it is no sacrifice to give my first morning hours to God, but not as a rule.  Usually I go to bed at night and ask God to wake me up when He wants to meet with me.  I know this sounds silly, but it has worked for years.  If I need to start getting ready at 5:30, I will open my eyes at 5:00.  This morning, for example, I asked God to wake me up before it was time to leave and I opened my eyes at 7:00.  I groaned and asked God why He didn’t wake me up, then I saw the snow outside and there is a 2 hour delay for school!  God let me sleep in 2 whole hours!  Anyway, God has been faithful to wake me up when He wants to meet with me, but I am not always faithful to listen.  I have many excuses, most of them sound convincing in the wee hours of the morning.  I suffer from horrible fatigue.  It comes with the whole depression/anxiety package.  It is an unnatural fatigue where I literally can sleep anywhere I happen to be.  So, in the morning when God wakes me up, I tell Him that I need to get my sleep so that I won’t be tired all day.  Then I go back to sleep until my back-up alarm wakes me up.  I get up and feed the animals and try to sit down to hurriedly spend a few minutes with God.  I start thinking of all the things I need to accomplish in the day and it all becomes overwhelming.  I end up spending my precious minutes in self-pity and I end up with a rushed, “Thanks God for the day, bless all the people in my life, I will try to spend time with you tonight, amen.”  Then, I am tired all day anyway, despite the extra hour or two of sleep I stole from God.  I am “robbing God” just like He says in Malachi. 

So, if the same principles of MONEY apply to TIME, which I believe they do, if I am faithful in giving my first-fruits of TIME to Him, then He will “throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that [I] will not have room enough for it!”  He will “prevent pests (fatigue, unexpected circumstances, lack of motivation, etc.) from devouring [my] crops (the rest of my day) and the vines in [my] fields will not cast their fruit (my day will be fruitful)!  Can you imagine having more time in the day than you know what to do with?  But oh how hard it is to get up in the morning!  I guess this is where the sacrifice comes in.  But God asked me to test Him in this, so test Him I will!  I will, in faith, give Him the first part of my day and trust that He will carry me though any circumstances that come my way during the rest of it. 

 Somehow, Paul and Silas praised God.  I don’t believe that God anesthetized their pain.  I believe they suffered through the pain and praised God until the pain became bearable.  That is the challenge we face: living the pain and suffering until it becomes bearable.  When praise is the LAST thing that comes naturally to us and we choose to worship Him anyway, we’ve just had the privilege of offering a genuine sacrifice of praise. 

The pain in my life over the past few years has been depression and anxiety.  God has taught me to praise Him even though that is the very last thing I’ve wanted to do.  I remember sitting on my front porch and telling God that I didn’t believe He could exist because there is no way He could be a loving God and allow me so much despair and anguish.  But, I reached beyond what I felt and did what I knew.  I thanked God for the day even when I couldn’t get out of bed to see it.  I thanked Him for my job even though the thought of going there caused every symptom of a heart attack.  I thanked Him for my children, even though I feared them.  I thanked Him for my husband who was about the only thing I really was thankful for.  I sang to God.  I danced before God.  I  smiled at the world.  In my peer review from work were things like “she is always so happy and brings peace to the department” “she is level headed and does not become overly excited at stressful situations” “she helps us to feel relaxed and happy”.  These all came during my deepest period of anxiety and depression!  When my husband had to drive me to work because I was afraid to drive, when I would spend my lunch hour hidden in an unused room crying, when each time I entered a patient’s room my heart would feel as if it were bursting through my chest.  This is not faking peace or happiness, this is grabbing a hold of what you can’t feel, but knowis there.  It is the evidence of things unseen.  It is FAITH that God is there and that He loves you.  The change in my life was not instantaneous.  God did not see a child struggling and drop a flash of joy down into my life.  Slowly I crawled out of my pit of hell and I can now FEEL God again.  But when I begin to notice the signs of depression or dispair or when my heart starts to pound and I feel like running away, I stop and immediately thank God for His goodness.  I KNOW that I will survive.  I may again decend into that deep dark pit of dispair, but even though I may not feel God’s presence, I will praise Him and know He is there.  I will continue to offer my sacrifice of praise to Him.

When Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to ”Love the lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” (Mt. 22:37), my question is , “But how do I love God?”  Jesus Himself answered that, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (Jn 14:15) and John said ”This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.” (1 Jn 5:3).  So, the beginning of loving God is a passionate desire to please and obey Him.  ”Unquestioning acceptance of and obedience to Jesus’ authority is the foundation of the Christian life.  Everything else rests upon this.”  But how do I know what God wants me to do?  Read His Word, the living source of His will.  Wow, how important are those mornings when I unpaste my eyes and say, “Oh God, I’ll just sleep in 10 more minutes” and then I open my eyes 2 hours later, having missed my meeting with the Creator.  I know He is still with me reguardless, but I have not filled my “heart, soul, and mind” with His Word so that all of the emotions and circumstances of the day are tempered with His great understanding instead of my own.  Circumstances do not change just because I have met with God, but my reaction to them has.  I feel more loving, more alert, less depressed, less likely to act upon my emotions.  Jesus meditated and talked with God often, shouldn’t I? 

Anyway, I’m only into chapter 4, but I think this will be another life-altering book for me.