The Gnawing Ache of Our Restless Discontentment

My prayer:

“I’ve been in a slump Lord and wondering why I feel bored with my life and finally realizing the One I miss is You.  Interesting because I feel You with me all the time.  But You are teaching me that if I don’t take the time to sit and listen to You, my intimate needs of connecting with you will wane.

You are who I miss.  It is You I need. 

When I can’t put my finger on what I’m lacking, then I can always know it is You.  Oh, for the body of Christ to learn this truth!  There wouldn’t be so many needy people. 

So, here I am my Love.  I long for You in the deepest places.  In the depth of my soul. 

Fill my cup back up Lord.  Fill me up and make me whole.  Give me energy again, and health, and vitality.

Hope and vision.

Thank you for Your patience with me and your long-suffering.  Thank you also for the vision of me as an uncut diamond that You are in process of chiseling away the dark coal–which is causing the light of Yourself to shoot off of me in so many ways. 

Wow!  I can see it!

As I waited on Him, He replied, “Yes, my love it is about your depletion of me.  This is the next step of intimacy.  You already know that I walk with you every moment, but now you must remember that when you are feeling lonely, sad, bored, and have a lack of vision, it is me you are being called to connect with.

Your reserves are depleted when you give out of yourself so much of the time and you get distracted.  You forget to move all distractions out of the way and just sit with Me, so I can fill you up.

I am your very life line.

Instead of turning to everything else, including connecting with people, you must turn to Me.  If you do this, you will find your rest and peace and restored hope for the life I have called you too. 

Yes, you are My diamond. The rays of My light shoot off of you as I have been chiseling away on everything that obscures my light.  This will continue to manifest more and more as you walk on in the face of the chiseling.  Your suffering for me has not gone unnoticed and your maturity in rising above the flesh in the many hardships you have faced has made Me delight over you with joy. 

Feel My smile, Dixie.

Feel My love, Dixie.

Feel My presence enveloping you, Dixie.

I love you!”

I have shared with you my most recent conversation with Jesus.  This came out of a time when I was needy and not realizing what it was I needed.

So I asked Him!

Do you stop and just ask Him what it is you need at those confusing moments?  Sometimes we just don’t even think about asking Him what our problem is.

Jesus sees you as His precious treasure…and He longs to have a close relationship with you.

More than anything, He wants you to have an intimate love relationship and friendship with Him.  God wants you to spend time with Him and intimately communicate with Him, to enjoy fellowship with Him, to trust and follow Him, and to give your life meaning and purpose by giving you the privilege of joining Him in His life here on earth.

All of humanity, can be defined as a vast, gaping need.  Looking across the globe of this generation, we witness men and women, young and old, throwing themselves into entertainment, recreation, technology, food, music, friends, and a host of things as they grope for the answer to the riddle of why they are alive and seek to silence the screaming voice of yearning in their souls.   

And throw in these troubling times of terror and the unknown of what we will face before we are taken out of here is gripping people with fear…and distracting them from the very One who can give them peace when our world is seemingly falling apart.

No matter how much we buy, who we know, or what fleeting pleasures we experience, we find that none of it can quench the insatiable thirst in the depths of our being.  So it is that day after day we go about panting and groaning for something that will satisfy the desires that dominate our inner man.

It is in the gnawing ache of this restless discontentment so familiar to us all that the subject of intimacy with God finds its significance.

Intimacy is a word being thrown around a lot in our day, both inside and outside of the Church.

 Some of us are afraid of it.

 We all know that we want it because, on some level, we believe that only God can fill that void in our hearts.  Still, for most of us, we don’t know quite how to get it, and what it actually means when we’re referring to intimacy with God Himself.

We must realize that it is not just a certain way of speaking about God, nor is it merely a feeling we experience.

Intimacy with God consists of relational knowledge – we are most intimate with those whom we know at the deepest levels.  Jesus stands at the center of this pursuit because in His face we see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, and that is what intimacy is really all about.

One of the most common disillusions relates to how He feels about you.  From years of various and sundry teachings born out of our organizational churches, deep inside we think that Jesus is mostly unemotional and distant, except for how disappointed He is with us – that is the one feeling many of us are convinced He does actually feel.

Yet, the truth is that His heart is full of love and desire for you.  This isn’t just an idea or a sweet sentiment, but a reality that He put on display in every moment of His life.

In drinking in the wild beauty of this Man, your soul will at last find its rest.  This is intimacy, and this is what you were created for – to enjoy and adore the splendor of His glory forever.

So forgetting what is behind, let us press on to know Him.

5 Things I Know By Experience About Actively Letting Go–And the Agony of It!

Actively letting go is a little more pro-active than when you are forced to let go. 

It’s a practice.

It’s being awake.

It can bring great relief.

Except for the agony of it!

It is not the same as “passively letting go”.  Like when you have no choice…whereby life rips stuff out of your grip, or you paint yourself into a corner, or life gets suddenly interrupted by a sudden loss.

I’m talking about a decision to let go of something that only Jesus can heal or take care of. 

We are not saviors.  He is! 

5 Things I know by experience about actively letting go:

1. There’s always more to let go of.  Our life is a journey of surrender.  The sooner we realize we are not the fixers, the sooner we are released from the burden of trying to figure it all out.  And sometimes we have to let go of the same thing 100 times or more.

2. Letting go is painful – in varying degrees, and it is going to stretch you until you feel pain.  It leaves an emptiness, a place that the thing took up,  that you then have to ask Jesus to fill up for you.

3. When you find the strength in your spirit to be tough enough to let go, you cross over a sacred line.  And on the other side, His tenderness is waiting for you for He has just been waiting for you to release it, (or them, or whatever it is that you were holding onto).

4. Baby steps are okay, but you can’t avoid the pain that surfaces when you commit to the letting go and the longer you wait, the longer it takes to see Him fixing the thing you had a vice grip on.

5. Acceptance is obedience and obedience means intimacy with the One who stands there waiting patiently for you to get there.

When you just accept that the pain of letting go is part of the deal, your let-go wound will heal faster.

I’ve had to let go of a dizzying amount of things in a relatively short amount of time:  

Our joint investigation business, a steady income as a result, my picture of what my ministry should look like by now, my books selling as fast as I wanted them too, adult children (whom God-is-doing-amazing things-in-their-lives-but-only-after-I-gave-up-trying-to-make-it-happen by-myself, and got out of His way), my house, my mother, our joint income, vacations as I knew them, Grandbabies growing up, a lifestyle I cherished, friends moving on…need I go on?   

Painful things. 

But I’ve surrendered to the endlessness of it.  And it’s a resolution that softens my spirit.  It is a solution of surrender…which means growth and trust and intimacy with the One that I trust to handle it all for me; the things out of my control…

Where I got in the way!

Deep, deep, deep in my soul, beneath limits of time, and fantasies, and things I “captured” along the way that I thought I could fix, is the freedom that has been pulling me forward my whole life.  Forward right into His lap. 

Gazing into His eyes with my spirit, even though each and every time it is like cutting off an appendage, I let go of my priceless treasures that are outside of my control, and give it all to Him.

So I’m still shedding — taking deep breaths and actively letting go.  I’m not waiting until I’m ready to let go.  I’ve waited long enough.  Carried stuff long enough.  Longed long enough.

For lightness.

For that tender place, dancing with Him, on the other side of courage.

And you know what?  In each and every case after actively letting go, I have found the reality of truly living by faith…for He has never let me down.  

And I have delightfully discovered that He does a much better job of fixing than I can. 

So, take a deep breath, and as an act of faith, share with me those things you have truly let go of too! 

I would love to hear from you!