asking for your grace today; a quiet repost
God's Assuring Voice Sings Love Across The Storm.
"For God hath made me fruitful in the land of my affliction" (Gen. 41:52).
The summer showers are falling. The poet stands by the window watching them. They are beating and buffeting the earth with their fierce downpour. But the poet sees in his imaginings more than the showers which are falling before his eyes. He sees myriads of lovely flowers which shall be soon breaking forth from the watered earth, filling it with matchless beauty and fragrance. And so he sings:
(Hasn't Ann VosKamp taught us that emptiness does SING)
"It isn't raining rain for me, it's raining daffodils;
In every dimpling drop I see wild flowers upon the hills.
A cloud of gray engulfs the day, and overwhelms the town;
It isn't raining rain for me: it's raining roses down."
Perchance some one of God's chastened children is even now saying, "O God, it is raining hard for me tonight.
"Testings are raining upon me which seem beyond my power to endure. Disappointments are raining fast, to the utter defeat of all my chosen plans. Bereavements are raining into my life which are making my shrinking heart quiver in its intensity of suffering. The rain of affliction is surely beating down upon my soul these days."
Withal, friend, you are mistaken. It isn't raining rain for you. It's raining blessing. For, if you will but believe your Father's Word, under that beating rain are springing up spiritual flowers of such fragrance and beauty as never before grew in that storm less, unfastened life of yours.
You indeed see the rain. But do you see also the flowers? You are pained by the testings. But God sees the sweet flower of faith which is up springing in your life under those very trials.
You shrink from the suffering. But God sees the tender compassion for other sufferers which is finding birth in your soul.
Your heart winces under the sore bereavement. But God sees the deepening and enriching which that sorrow has brought to you.
It isn't raining afflictions for you. It is raining tenderness, love, compassion, patience, and a thousand other flowers and fruits of the blessed Spirit, which are bringing into your life such a spiritual enrichment as all the fullness of worldly prosperity and ease was never able to beget in your innermost soul." --J. M. McC.
(Devotional From Steams In The Desert).
I was visiting another blog the other day and she had posted this devotion as I read it I wept. It was then that I remembered that I have this same devotion book. ("Streams In The Desert,") I quickly flipped it open to the current date and read it aloud on my prayer bench. Amy keeps telling me to just sit and be still. But I continue to allow myself to be pulled in 80 different directions....Not stopping to just
breath....... It is only after reading this beautiful devotion that I realize that maybe I am in a storm to be the broken!
Haven't we all been wounded? Sometimes by our own fleshing blood!
Maybe even left...........with your heart split wide open.........where you actually do bleed the kind of blood that can't be replaced.....the kind that tears...........at you and spills the real you out on the floor.
Because out of the mouth the heart does speak.
The reaction that causes the
fear to react.............and then it's the head that bows the low........and it is then that I am in the need...............the need for a saviour........a lifter of my head........by
His grace alone!
Why isn't it enough what JESUS did for us on that cross?
How easily I am ensnared...........in the tangled web...........of
LIFE'S lullabies.
It is the now the world (Babylon) in which I live.............no home-schooled teens here. We can barley mumble a prayer of thanksgiving out before the teens have taken their first bite out of their meal.
The mission trips that are coming up fast...........the preparing............the leaders that keep the saying,
"you will have a new child when they return!"
Pipe dreams I think when I feel disappointment that has pierced me the hard...........right through the heart.
But where is the forgiveness? The longer I bow the knees and hang the head down low.........is where I find I am tucked into the wings of pure grace.
Where is the grace that I so gladly take? Does it not apply to the ones who pierce my heart the hard?
If we are the given.........given the door of
grace.......then shouldn't we be the first to open up our door of forgiveness?
What if we saw
grace through His eyes?
I am the broken mama with the broken girls......but do I really want to be the fixed? All these years I have tried to do the fixing myself.................is it because I am my own God? Is it the control that I so madly crave? The anger that has hurt much and little has been healed.........Is it that thy wounded self has open sores and when brushed up against it hurt others?
But in all thy brokenness comes the whisper; "
Thy Redeemer Lives," He has taken His own body and broken it for us the broken:
and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; (1 Cor. 11:24)
By His wounds we are healed. It is by our brokenness that God himself does His best work.
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. (Psalm 34:18)
Knowing that I am the broken but also the called............the called to mimic the
life of Jesus....so I give a little more.................I pour out even more and
forgiveness...............forgiveness is given the ever more.
Because the broken will see healing.........and be showered upon by our redeemer who lives.
by grace alone,
Robbie
thankful today for;
long walks with the hubby
for the sunlight that comes across the tile floor
the purple butterfly that stayed with me on my walk
the cooler temperatures
the wind blowing through the trees
for a God who really does answer prayers
for a changed heart
for the teens who always fight
for the wet bathing suits in the floor
əˈleɪ
