Suffocated by (false) hope

Before I get started on this post, I just want to say that I hope I didn't give the impression in my last post that "feeling more burdened than blessed" is a dominant state of mind. It certainly can be, but I didn't mean to imply that just because moms can feel a little overwhelmed at times, or frustrated because they are not feeling "blessed" by their children 24 hours a day, that feeling burdened dominates. I just started getting unsettled about my own wording and wanted to be sure I was clear on that. All I'm really trying to say is that God's most generous blessings do not always leave us feeling blessed. And that is not to say that they always leave us feeling burdened either! Capiche? I am probably just butchering my thoughts on this subject, so on to other things.

Actually, I lied. I'm sticking to the same subject. You know someone who's been feeling a little too much burden and a lot too little blessing these days? This gal right here. (I'm pointing to me.) Which is completely and utterly ridonculous because I live just about as much of a charmed life as I could possibly imagine.

I just read Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts, which was written because of a challenge to her to write down 1000 blessings. The importance of how we filter our lives with our thoughts and perspective is just so glaringly obvious. We have become so entitled as Americans. As a group, we just keep taking and taking and taking and always looking for more because none of it ever satisfies. And when we do that, we fail to recognize just how much we have been given and that God, who owes us nothing, is the gracious author of every last one of those good gifts. When we recognize his gifts, we can stop mindlessly consuming and start appreciating what we have.

My own selfishness stunned me a few weeks ago, and it continues to stun me. I met Justin before I ever had the desire to be married. And I almost literally have no idea how I wound up with someone so devoted to me and, even more than that, devoted to working to have a marriage that is pleasing to God. So I was stunned to step out of what has become this almost all consuming desire to have a child to realize just how all consuming it has become. If God chooses to keep our earthly family as just me and Justin, I am so blessed! I am so blessed to have him as my husband. And yet so many days feel more polluted by a desire for something I do not have than warmed by much deserved gratitude to God for all that I do have.

This is the first month in a while that I have had the opportunity to feel the all too familiar sensation of days and hours and minutes crawling by until I have answers for another month. The week I can take a pregnancy test. The week I simply cannot stop wondering: Will this be the month we can get on with our lives and that I can stop obsessing about becoming a mom? The week I begin waiting for a day that is not too early to take a test. The week I have been known to take as many as three tests. Because inevitably, the test comes back negative and then I reason that I must have taken it too early. So the questions, and the unquenchable ray of optimism, persist. This is my suffocation by hope.

But any hope that is suffocating is no hope at all. For God's word says, "You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you" (Isa 26:3) and again, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil 4:6-7).

Jesus is our only real hope. He is the only unfailing hope. The only perfect hope. Hoping in anything else is foolishness. Even if the thing I hope in is good, it can never be good enough to replace God. Which is why hoping in anything else is sinful idolatry. And why that false hope leads to suffocation. Not perfect peace.

I pray that God uses this time in my life to teach me to put my hope in Christ, my rock and my redeemer, and to teach me to gratefully accept whatever gifts and whatever trials may come from his perfect hand. That is my prayer for me. And it is also my prayer for all of you. Maybe this will be the month I finally learn.

For your reading (and contemplating) pleasure

This post about Lot's wife and the dangers of looking back particularly struck me today. (The post is from Bring the Rain, so those of you who follow her blog may have already seen/read it.) The past month or two in particular I have been struggling not to look back longingly for what could have been. This post was a good reminder that God is first of all concerned with our obedience in moving forward--simultaneously fleeing from sin while also growing in wisdom and trust in God's will--and that, as an added bonus, where he's asking us to go is also incomprehensibly better for everyone involved.

Sometimes it's just too hard to look past my own nose. We can't see the big picture, but we can have faith in its beauty, knowing the One who painted it.

What a gift. What a promise.

Keep on keepin' on, friends.

Take the glory

I am a runner. Did you know this? Ha. Something tells me the answer is yes, and that anyone reading this may even be rolling their eyes at that statement. Here we go again. More running talk. But if you're worried that this is a post about running, let me just go ahead and and reassure you that it's not.

I know that many people, maybe even the majority, love running about as much as they love doing laundry. My love runs a little deeper, though. (No pun intended.) When I'm in shape, there's nothing better than "being a runner," but right now I am struggling not to fade into becoming a former runner. For the past seven months or so, that's seemed like the more apt description. So I understand that it may sound strange to many of you to hear me say that, as I've been trying to run more consistently again, I've been asking God to teach me to run for Him--to run on His strength--instead of running for myself and on my own strength. If running is a part of my identity, then I want to make sure I recognize God--the source of my identity--as the author of that. I want to run "to feel His pleasure" as Eric Liddell said in Chariots of Fire.

The other day I had one of my first lessons, which, not surprisingly, is very applicable to every other area of life. It was one of those lessons that I've heard here and there in several different forms many times before but finally became a lightbulb moment of sorts to me.

As is often the case these days, I was about halfway through my run and willing myself to keep moving. I started praying, "Lord, give these legs strength and to You be all the glory. Not to me." To be perfectly honest, this prayer didn't seem to be having much effect, but I kept repeating it nonetheless. Isn't that the definition of insanity? But God can and does straighten out our insanity, and somewhere among all those repetitions, my prayer became simply "Take the glory." And that was the lightbulb moment. Once I stopped asking for more and simply recognized whatever portion I had and turned that over to God, THEN, at THAT moment, God granted me more strength. It was still a very slow run, but it was glorious. It was His.

And this was the larger lesson I took from that lightbulb moment: How can any of us ask for more if we don't recognize that all we have--even if it doesn't feel like much--has already been granted to us solely by the grace of God? There are so many people who don't even have the use of their legs. God has blessed me abundantly, in running and even more so in everyday life, so to You Lord, help me always to joyfully say...

Take the glory!