Long Lasting Love

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good,
for His Steadfast love endures forever.
Psalm 136

Some time has passed since I last posted here. I write blog after blog and they just sit there unfinished. When asked, I describe what I am doing right now as "working and living". It really sounds riveting. But the last six months or so have been just that. There have been high's and lo's of course and 'working and living' is never really as simple as it sounds, however my life has been fairly steady for a while.

When I first met Christ and really gave Him my life, I was awakened and revived. I had been stuck in my walk with the Lord before He rescued me. Stuck in my life in many ways. Relatively hopeless. I pretty much gave up on ever really knowing God. So when He found me, it was a 180 degree turn around. My life held such contrast and change. Everyday was a revelation and I couldn't write down my thoughts and feelings fast enough. Scripture was food to me. There was so much in my life that was out of order and off track. My past was being dealt with, my sin removed, addiction overcome, and my broken heart was being mended. It was a season of knowing Him and being known by Him for the first time. I love looking back at this 'first-love' journey. My whole world collided with His Kingdom and it was a bit of a whirlwind. My journey was anything but neat and tidy. For me entering into an intimate close relationship with the Lord was the hardest thing I have done. And obviously the most satisfying. Knowing Him meant unknowing a lot of other things. It was messy and chaotic and everything in my life was shaken. My mistakes were many and it was anything but smooth. God took things from me that were causing me pain and He filled me with new life. I'm not exaggerating, if someone even said the name Jesus, I would feel it in my heart. It was the falling in love kind of time. If you asked me, I would have told you; I don't think I'll be a nurse...work? no way! I think I will do something crazy. I will probably move somewhere dangerous. I wanted to please God with a life not normal. I wanted to be brave and just jump into this life of faith head first, no looking back. I would have days of such restlessness and be just about ready to leave nursing school and become a single pastor in Africa or anything reckless. I could say now that it was all just emotion and immaturity, but really, I was just in love. Jesus was becoming the center of my life. His love was taking over me and I wanted my life on the outside to display His worth and the love I felt for Him on the inside. There were days I just felt like I would explode if I had to do things like study for an exam or empty the dishwasher. Unless it had Jesus written on it I was bored. I had my heart set on radical living and the practical routine side of things made me cringe.

So when I say now that I'm just 'wokring and living' it isn't casual to me. It has been quite a process to become okay with that. I haven't felt radical or insanely courageous, and I am not walking the streets of poverty proclaiming the gospel. I wake up, and I go to work. Full time. More often than not I am packing a lunch, cleaning my room, driving to town and working. I love my friends and I just live. I could make it sound really boring, and then there are days with a lot of excitment, but overall, my life on the outside is just life right now.

After my initial season of growth and falling in love with the Lord, I was challenged in many areas. The past few years were not tragic, but they were far from smooth sailing. I had a few significant relational loses and many of the things I had felt the Lord was really doing in my life changed or ended. It felt at the time like the main areas I had invested my newly healed, passionate heart, had ended in just more breaking. I spent months wrestling with doubt and anxiety. Anxiety that made me not want to leave my room. Anxiety that woke me with a thumping in my chest that said today is already a fail. Confusion made reading my Bible a challenge. Fear to try again in any capacity was tangible, I could feel it in my stomach. I felt like I had my name written down with one failed attempt at whole hearted living for Jesus. I worried that my love for Him was fading, or that my life was not going to be worthy of His calling. I felt that no matter how I lived my day it was just not going to be enough. I worried that I was just being selfish and inward, or that I just hadn't been diligent enough in searching out my own weaknesses. Things were grey to me and meaningless. Decisions were such a struggle and I constantly had this nagging fear that I was going to become complacent and slip back into my old life. Spiritually, I was crippled, I was paralyzed. I replayed scenarios in my head and analyzed them inside and out to see where I had gone off track. I kept doing the things I knew I should do spiritually, but I felt so lost. I felt like I was wrestling with God and growing tired. I feared I would give up. After a season when He had been speaking to me all the time, I found myself hearing nothing. I graduated, got a job and moved. I was thankful and somewhat excited but I had no real sense of being in His will. I felt impartial to where I worked. I was so worried that my love and faith was going to run out, or that His patience would come to an end. I felt passion fading and what I spent so much time avoiding became my life.

The mundane.

I hated it at first. I resisted it. I squirmed and questioned. I listened to every intense motivational sermon I could find. Destiny, intersession, 24hr prayer, missions, evangelism, and on and on. I condemned myself in every way possible, I tossed and turned anxiously and tried to will my life to be different. I didn't like the path I was on, it was so plain and dim to me. I missed passion and love and learning and growing. The love and passion for Christ I had built my life on was being tested. I worried that my faith would not stand. I searched my heart day and night for what I was doing wrong, I confessed sins that I don't even think I committed! I was desperate to be out of the fog. I would get myself so distraught. Anxiety took the place of joy. I tried everything I had ever heard of to get myself right again with this silent God and I was tired. I came to the end of my solutions and efforts. After like six months.

Day by day, with the months passing, I just kept living. That's it. I had no supernatural light bulb moment, no one spoke over me in a crowd. I didn't hear a voice in my dream. I didn't wake up one day and just feel better. I just kept working and living. I read some good books, had some good prayer times. Over and over. I grew tired of trying to change God's will. I put aside all the convicting sermons and started to just read His Words. The basics only. I chose to become clay. I stopped screaming at the Potter and anxiously clutching what I thought I should be. And slowly, really slowly, my white knuckled fists began to open. It wasn't magical, it wasn't instant. Time passed, and I lived.

Anxiety haunted me by times, but I found myself picturing that clay, and seeing my hands open. I found myself submitting to Him in surrender and receiving whatever the day would hold. I stopped hoping for big crazy things, and started to just hope for Him. I stopped looking at the outer things of my day, and started laying myself before Him in abandonment and just saying 'whatever you want, You are the One who made me, I am Yours'. I stopped putting pressure on myself to be more and slowly opened up my closed off heart again to let Him be all. I learned slowly, one moment at a time that He had never left, that I was in His perfect will by surrender not by effort. By letting go not by striving. He told me again of His love and gentleness towards me. His mercy. His grace. He spoke quietly, in small things, He spoke healing instead of condemnation. He was the same One I had known at first. I forgot. He reminded me daily and I began to let go.

I cannot explain the sweetness of surrender and how it soothed my anxiety. The way His sovereignty gave me peace that let me breathe deep again. And what I found incredible was that time had passed, I had done nothing insane with my life for God, I had nothing really to give Him but my fears and weaknesses, and as I just kept living, He kept loving. 

You know the word enduring means continuing, or long lasting. The synonyms strike me too: remain, abide, stay, to persist, to continue, to suffer-long. 

To live on.

The opposite of short-lived or fading. To live on forever.

In Psalm 136 the writer gets it. Twenty six times he writes. His love endures. His steadfast love endures. Forever. Over and over He endures.

His enduring, steady love slowly changed my heart again. Freedom came soft and sweet. Time passed. He taught me about the mundane and how to live it with thanksgiving while pursuing excellence. He spoke of the value of the unseen things. Of character worthy of calling. He is breathing meaning into work and lunch making. He is making the small things matter and showing me that all is eternal in His eyes. Time keeps passing here. He is breathing meaning into everything. Dry bones coming back to life. He is reminding me of the numbered hairs on my head, and how to be present. How to receive His will for me today open handed, without protesting and without fear of missing His purposes. Or fear of being too dark for Him to fix. He reminds me of simplicity and worship. He reminds me of His love that started everything and He takes me back to a place where He is enough, and He says that I am too because I have Him.

Each day the sun rises and some days I wake with anxiety and some days I wake full of joy, and He whispers to my heart that He is faithful like the sun. That He endures through the winter. That sometimes the trial is not obvious and drastic like I picture it to be, sometimes the trial is just time. And the answer is not super-spiritual, the answer is to live on. Because my life is hidden in Him now. And He lives on and on. He never quits. He never quits in the valleys and the mountains, and He never quits in the day to day level walking either. He can make the straight and plain full of meaning and color.

If you want to test His enduring love, keep living. Live your life just as it is today, keep going. Don't long for what is different until you see His enduring love in today. Paul says "continue in what you have heard". See if there is ever a day that His love stops. Twenty six times they write it in this Psalm. I used to skim it and say I get the point. But I read it slow now because each morning He is there in the faithful sun rising. We keep living and it keeps rising. We live and His love lives on. Forever.

The flame of love in my heart for Jesus has not gone out, it has not flickered or grown dim. The light maybe doesn't show itself in loud obvious 'africa' dreams like it has before. The flame in my heart has just kept on because His love for me has kept on. The flame of His love dances in me and you now with a story of a life lived out on earth and a Life laid down into the earth. It amazes me, I wake and He loves. The sun sets and rises. He rises. Time keeps passing and my life is small but His love still shines like the sun, in brilliance and power. The mundane becomes weighty glory, a testimony of enduring, long-suffering love.

Love that lasts and lasts and lasts.

Martina