Wanderlust or Just Wandering, Part III

I didn’t realize these offended thoughts toward my Lord - seeds as it were – could find fertile soil within the barren arid ground of my spirit. But they did. Offended thought-seeds can germinate anywhere, especially when the enemy waters and fertilizes it with verbiage from his bag of tricks.

These offense seeds are like cancer cells are to our body. They start small and replicate when the environment is out of alignment. Pretty soon illness takes over, but because the malignant seeds are well-hidden from view by this point, you can’t see the forest from the trees. For 18 years I didn’t see where the originating offense came from because I was too busy blaming everyone or everything else. 

Since this divine revelation of my offense with the One that died for me, I’ve asked Him and myself, “Why did it take me 18 years to get it?” Am I that dense?

The Lord brought me to a devotional from Oswald Chambers that put it in perspective:

Our Lord does not hide these things; they are unbearable until we get into a fit condition of spiritual life. There must be communion with His risen life before a particular word can be borne by us.” *

I have been communing more with my naval than His risen life. My hurt, pain, and betrayal were far more palpable than who Jesus was in my circumstances. How sad. I have spent the better part of 38 years walking with the Lord, but not connecting with who He is. My only measuring stick was what He’d done for me – but that was not enough to keep offense from multiplying and dividing like an insidious diseased cell.

The cry of my heart now is the see Him; the kind of seeing as when you can’t take your eyes off the object of your affections. The kind of seeing and knowing that sees past the “doing”, past the flesh and soul.

The kind that sees His heart.

*My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers

Starving Writer's Imagination Seeks Audience of One

Is your imagination starved? I know mine is. Does your imagination look towards the heavens or at an idol? By idol, I mean work, leisure time, your spouse, yourself.

I’ve come to the harsh reality that my imagination is starving to death. Oh it is active enough! The writer’s imagination is never silent or stoic. It skips rapidly from one creative rock to another along the stream of life.

That isn’t my problem. My starvation comes from what the said stream retains.

The children of Israel starved their imagination by looking upon the face of idols. Isaiah, in his wisdom, reminded them to look to the heavens. Nature is God’s creative autograph of His Glory and Power.

"Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
    Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
    and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
    not one of them is missing." Isaiah 40:26 NIV

Our ability to imagine is limitless. Why then - and I speak to myself – do we limit God?

Oswald Chambers wrote, “Imagination is the power God gives a saint to position himself out of himself into relationships he never was in.” 1

With recent fussing and fidgeting before God, it came to me with surprising clarity how small I have made my Lord. I minimize my creator in so many ways. Doubting His love, doubting His presence, worrying about that medical bill and how it will get paid, choosing to act without clear direction because I think He’s late, or… helping my sacrifice off the alter because I don’t see it’s replacement in a thicket.

Since childhood my imagination has been my friend, confidant, therapist, and cheap entertainment. Upon a moment’s notice from boredom, stress, or trauma, my imagination has been at the ready and available. It is infinitely easier to slay imaginary dragons, take down enemies, and fall in love in my imagination.

But it has also been my undoing. A two-edged sword.

Like the Israelites, I have let my perception of God and His attentiveness in my life be dictated by what I imagine Him to be – not experiencing who He is.

As I shed what this world has taught me about myself, I long to see my creator and myself not through the eyes of my imagination, but through the eyes of Truth and clarity.

^“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate^[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV

¹ My Utmost for His Highest