Matthew 5 says, " When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said:
3"You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
4"You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you."
It's been one of those times when all I can see is loss. I get a bit cynical, feeling like I'm just going to lose every friend I make, so why bother. Battling anger at God for giving what feels like all loss in my life. None of this is really true, but sometimes it just feels like it.
Then I picked up Kandice's birthday gift to me from 2007, Beth Moore's Praying God's Word, and flipped it open to a section and found this quote from Oswald Chambers.
Based on Isaiah 6:1--in the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. "Our soul's history with God is frequently the history of the 'passing of the hero.' Over and over again God has to remove our friends in order to bring Himself in their place, and that is where we faint and fail and get discouraged. Take it personally: In the year that the one who stood to me for all that God was, died--I gave up everything? I became ill? I got disheartened? Or--I saw the Lord?"
Oh Lord, I know that when you empty my hands of every other treasure I clutch, when you take the sledgehammer to the idols I have been holding in my heart, even the good things of earthly friendship and love, it is because you want to fill that space with something infinitely better--yourself. So I give you permission to keep taking aaway, keep bringing in loss, keep smashing other things besides you that I hold dear, because I trust that you are worth it and will fill those places with yourself.
