Christmas vacation was awesome this year. I got to spend it with my husband AND my family all at the same time. Usually, one of the other is missing. It was nice. It was very, very nice. I also got the opportunity to hang out with three of my very best friends from college, most of whom I haven’t seen in a decade. Wow. I’m getting old! 🙂 That was fun, too, and set me to musing about friendship, but that’s a post for another time.
What’s got me thinking today is something that’s had me thinking for several days now. I’m trying to sit still and just listen to God more, instead of doing all of the talking to Him. Sometimes I can manage to sit still and just BE with Him, and other times I wind up getting fidgety and missing anything He’s trying to tell me. Well, on Saturday, I managed to get still. And what He said really got me.
In college, I did something that I consider to be the top Very Bad Thing I’ve ever done. I’ve said before that it took me a lot of years to come around to forgiving myself for it, and that the realization that I actually had to forgive myself was the basis of my book, Going in Circles. Let’s add to that the fact that what I used to write was way way way less than God-honoring. It was selfish and just plain ol’ wrong.
I said that to say this: On Saturday, God let me know that even when I was doing the Very Bad Thing and even when I was writing all of the not-so-God-honoring stuff, He was looking at me and seeing the ultimate outcome. He was looking at me, mired in that sin and mired in that writing and He was seeing the good that would come out of it, was seeing the way that He would one day use it for His glory in my life. Not that the sin wasn’t sin. Not that He discounted it or approved of it. But in His infinite Godness and grace and glory He saw the big picture. Not only that, but He loves me so much that He let a sinner like me actually do a work for His glory. That not only blows my mind, it’s like a full-force category 5 hurricane in my brain. Wow. He lets me work for Him, when I’m 100% unworthy. Unreal.
So when I say that God rocks my world, I’m not being figurative. That’s a totally literal statement. He has continually rocked the foundations of everything I thought I knew in the world and settled them back down on Him, the foundation that can’t be shaken.
That reminds me of a song. (Ha, ha… what doesn’t, right?) And it’s not a song you’d expect. It’s a B-side Weird Al Yankovic song (Weird Al and God… interesting combination…) called “Everything You Know Is Wrong.” And in it, he says, “Everything you know is wrong, black is white, up is down, and short is long. And everything you thought was so important doesn’t matter.” Every time I hear that song–which isn’t often, actually–I get to thinking about God and how He did that to my life. He shook me all up and showed me that, yep, everything that I thought I knew before Him? All wrong.
Ain’t it cool?
–JB
Leave a Reply