I'm tired. I'm impatient. Life doesn't go the way I want. Even while I complain about it, I know my dreams aren't over. I know that my present situation is going to be okay. Just right now I'm miserable.

I feel my pride and stubbornness forming a wall in my heart. I don't want that. If there is more of God for me to experience, and of course there is since He is infinite....then I don't want to limit it to a box of my own making. Or of my own heritage. Jesus is above and beyond what I can conceive. I pray God tears down the walls of pride in my heart.

I'm open. I don't know what to do...besides keep my face towards Him and ask Him to show me more.

Just as soon as I finished writing the previous post, I went to listen to the podcast from my family back in Louisiana....incredible

From Isaiah 64:

"Oh that You would rend the heavens and come down....
When You did awesome things that we did not look for, You came down...
No eye has seen a God besides You,
who acts for those who wait for Him"

"He does act on behalf of those who wait for Him"

"waiting on the Lord is always intimately connected with faith"

"an expectation or a longing for God to bring something He has promised"

from 2 Corinthians 1

"for all the promises of God find their Yes in Him.."

"Whatever is a burden on your heart...God is faithful and He DOES act for those who wait for Him..."

He is faithful to complete His work in us...

Rejoice in hope!
Be patient in tribulation!
Be constant in prayer!

Jesus thank you for faithfully speaking to me! Confirming Your promises and Your care.

If faith can move the mountains...let the mountains move...
We come with expectaion...waiting here for You....
You are everything You promised...Your faithfulness is true...
We're desperate for Your presence...all we need is You...

A couple years ago God gave me a word about someone I was (and still am really) praying for. I had such a burden and deep desire to see this friend come to know the Lord. He was going into harm's way as well and it struck me how he was already in the way of the wrath of God by not responding to the Father's love shown in Jesus. This terrified me. I found myself wishing that I could somehow step between the wrath of God and him and begging God to have mercy. Zechariah 9 came to me during that time. I didn't go looking for it. I just happened to read it. And it was one of those neon light moments, you know? One verse says "Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will release your prisoners from their waterless pit." It was so clear. It still resonates with me today. The next verse says "Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double." Sunday during church, before this storm had really hit, I read this passage in Zechariah again. So it was fresh on my mind.

 Fast forward to now...A different agony is gripping my heart. I've learned so much over the years about waiting, about being patient with things that seem to be withheld. About trusting God when I don't see the way and I don't have any hope left. When I am so afraid of disappointments. I know I'm more like Him now, but I'm still frustrated with the present setbacks. 

My heart has been wanting to just abandon the situation I'm in and go somewhere else. I'm so tired of fighting this same battle. Those thoughts have crossed my mind before but not for a while. At those times some lyrics from Sara Groves' "Painting Pictures of Egypt" has crossed my mind.

I don't want to stay here.
I don't want to leave.
It feels like pinching to me either way.
And the place I was wasn't perfect, but I had found a way to live.
And it wasn't milk or honey, but then neither is this.
I've been painting pictures of Egypt.
Leaving out what it lacks
The future feels so hard and I wanna go back..

So when I came to the word the other day, I was in Jeremiah. And I read in chapter 42:

"Do not fear him, declares the Lord, for I am with you to save you and to deliver you...
I will grant you mercy, that he may have mercy on you and let you remain in your own land. But if you say, 'We will not remain in this land,' disobeying the voice of the Lord your God and saying, 'No, we will go to the land of Egypt, where we shall not see war or hear the sound of the trumpet or be hungry for bread, and we will dwell there'...
If you set your faces to enter Egypt and go to live there, then the sword that you fear shall overtake you there...the famine of which you are afraid shall follow close after you...."

Pretty sure that means I am not supposed to change things right now. But wait. Trust. Believe what He has said.

What adds to the frustration lately, is the fact that every time I get on fb it seems like someone else is engaged or married. Or wishing their spouse a happy birthday or anniversary. Or welcoming a new baby.

Then I read Job 42:

"I know that You can do all things,
and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted....
the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends. And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before..."

I felt like specifically I should be praying for those friends that are newly engaged and married. Twice as much? Sounds a lot like that promise of restoring double that I received a couple years ago. I love the way the Lord speaks consistently and clearly. I cling to Him for sanity and clarity. Otherwise I would never make it in this wait.

Obviously I am not good at keeping up with this yet. :)

I was thinking the other day about a priniciple I remembering learning on a kids show years ago. They talked about how a family or group of people draw closer to each other when they draw closer to Christ. The illustration was of a family being represented by dots on a circle and Jesus being in the middle. As each person on the circle moved closer to Jesus it made the circle smaller and therefore they became closer to each other. Today when I was thinking about this...I thought about how when you are all the way up to the center of the circle you kind of look through the middle, through Jesus in this illustration, when you look at the person on the other side. Doesn't it change how you view someone when you look at them through Jesus? It does. If I filtered everything I thought about someone through who Jesus is and what He has done, it would change how I treated that person. Then I thought about the people even closer to you on the circle. The ones right on either side. Sometimes we can show greater impatience and less Christ-likeness to the people closest to us. Maybe because we are so close to them that we have to lean in to Christ a little bit more to look at them through His eyes. Just a thought. Probably a silly illustration. But why not? I'm sure sillier things than that have been posted today.