Sometime last night I decided today better be a sabbath. Now generally my sabbath is on Saturday; but since I have to wake up at 6:00 to get to a meeting tomorrow that I probably will not get home from until 2, I figured today better be my sabbath. Besides no amount of writing I could get done today would make up for being too tired to function in the meeting tomorrow and on Sunday at church. So I worked a few hours babysitting and went to the homeless shelter and called it a day.
I slept. I watched some television. I came to a realization that there are certain passages of scripture that I am biased against because of their use in my childhood. I cannot read them without hearing irritating ringing voices from the past. They are some pretty cool ones, too. I definitely want to work through this. I never want a human voice to be louder than God’s voice in my life.
I have been thinking about how I have gotten to know God in the last few years in a way that I never did in the first seven years I was saved. The first several years I tried to get to know Him by doing a lot of Bible study and trying to rehearse who I was in Christ over and over until I believed it. I used to fall asleep listening to scripture and wake up listening to it in an attempt to avoid nightmares. I definitely respect the work I put into my recovery in the first four years I was saved. I learned a lot of important things and reached a place I was no longer suicidal or really depressed. The one thing I never did was tell the whole truth in counseling, but I never had a counselor I felt like I could trust until about 14 months ago. If I had to tell me 10 years ago one piece of advice, it might have been to keep looking for counselors until you find one you trust!
I started this whole topic planning to say that now I know the way to get to know God is by following and obeying Him. This is where I have learned my identity. After hitting my second rock bottom and giving my will to Him not just my life. It was in having nothing, I discovered I had nothing to lose. It was easy to give everything when I had nothing to give except myself. It still was hard to give up my habits though. I cried and cried.
It was about four months before hitting rock bottom that I began to walk through the wall of pain that always prevented me from telling all in counseling or following God and giving up my addictions. Anyway, I say all that to say it is in following Him that I have lost my old identity and gained my new one. I have soaked in a lot of scripture in the last few years. Through reading it straight through though. Very little study. Mostly just absorbing it.
I read something the other day, I believe by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which is where I steal the origin of the following idea. When Jesus came to earth and was crucified for our sin, He for the first time experienced separation from the Father. Through “crucifying our flesh”, “participating in His suffering” and “taking up our cross”, we get to learn to know He and Father for the first time. Jesus’ crucifixion and our “crucifixion” are vastly different experiences because of this. We experience ultimate life as we are crucified. He experienced ultimate death.
Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. – I Corinthians 13:11-13
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