Letting Go of Goodbye

So, I wrote about goodbyes this week over at SHE SEEKS. Some of you may have come from there. Others may want to pop over after finishing this blog.

It’s not a topic I love, but it is a topic that is important. I mean, we can pretend that life is not full of goodbyes, but at some point we understand that it is…and we learn to deal with it.

I don’t love goodbyes (most of the time), but I have come to accept them as a part of my life, for the rest of my life.

I won’t rehash what I’ve already written about goodbyes HERE, but what I will say is that it seems that when we don’t practice acceptance of this life reality, a kind of clinging-thing goes on in our heart. Left alone, that clinging-thing can turn into a real spirit of defensiveness where we shy away from investing in people and things we feel we may someday lose.

We feel that the risk may be too high to fully give our heart to something we don’t know the outcome of…so we hold back just enough to preserve it.

But in the process, we don’t get the full experience of life, which includes love, loss, and often…letting go.

I encourage you today to resist the urge toward heart preservation if it means you don’t take a risk to love big, dream big or fully invest. If the time comes for you to say goodbye to that love, dream or investment, you can do so knowing it wasn’t because you didn’t give it all you could.

And you can do so knowing that clinging to anything but Jesus never really works, anyway. It is exactly the way this life thing is supposed to be.

Relentlessly Challenged

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year of my life, it’s that I don’t want to live my life without a challenge.

Even as I write those words, I struggle to acknowledge them, simply because I am not ignorant to what that may mean.

Disappointment.

Hard work and effort.

Being stretched beyond comfort.

Going places that feel scary and unfamiliar.

But while those things sound definitively unappealing, I also recognize them to be both necessary and inevitable on the spiritual journey. In other words, they come with the territory.

I can wish for a day off from these things, but the truth is, I’ve had lots of days…months…years off in my life as a believer. I’ve done my time on the sidelines.

And I know from experience how it feels to spend chunks of time without doing much of anything for God and experiencing the feelings to match. Looking back, it’s in those moments I’ve felt most desperate to hear from Him.

My experience with this has been sometimes confusing, and I myself could not explain why I felt most desperate when the waters were eerily calm and steady. I readily admit that there have been moments in my life where I’ve asked God to give me a few months, a couple of weeks, or even 10 minutes without providing me with a challenge. After coming out of ones that almost swallowed me whole, I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t altogether jazzed about jumping right back into a pool of difficulty.

But the truth is, I have never really wanted Him to take me up on that. Because the few times He has, I lived with the feeling that I was missing something. And it is not a feeling I enjoyed.

I've concluded that it must be a result of that proverbial “something” within us that desires more – the something that drives even the most challenge-resistant among us to crave a little water agitation in our life if it means we have a chance at some real life purpose.

In our fearless moments, we see its worth and run towards it.

In our conservative moments, we bolt the opposite way at the mere thought.

And though many of us like to civilize Christianity and tuck it into our safe little Jesus box, the reality is that the road of a follower of Jesus Christ should and will never be completely safe, predictable and self-managed. We’d prefer it, but it’s not possible.

And so all of us have to come to the point in our life and on our spiritual journey where we begin to make a shift. It is where we go from the point of desiring comfort, civility and smooth paths over passion, purpose and glorious unpredictability…to realizing that the only thing we cannot live without is the all-consuming presence of God in our life every single minute -- not a house in a gated community, with an Excursion to carry our 2.5 kids and fluffy black maltipoo around in.

Believers, Jesus and His cause is not meant to be made modern to meet our calendared lifestyle. He did not die so that we could arrange our life to be as comfortable as possible and bring Him into the picture on an as-needed basis. Though we don’t like the discomfort being a follower of Christ brings sometimes, the fulfillment level is one that is unable to be unmatched by a life of no sacrifices.

See the value in following Jesus. Spend every moment running after more of Him. Don’t stop serving Him until you take your last breath.

And don’t forget to crave the challenge. If you deny it, it will either die within you or consume you to the point where you have to answer to it.

The God call is relentless that way.

His, not mine.

Sometimes, God gently speaks to me in the quietness of my heart. In those sweet moments it is a spiritual confirmation or sense of understanding I most feel, coming from Him. These are moments I crave, appreciate, and relish.

And then sometimes, He speaks differently to me. I affectionately call these my “jerk-a-knot-in-my-chain” moments, often brought on by my desire to take the lead in my life. These are the moments I feel the authority of God taking reign of my insides. I probably need them more than I seek them.

Such a moment happened to me over the weekend.

I was getting ready for an event, thinking about some circumstances in my life. Between the whining, lamenting and general internal dialogue in my head, God very specifically spoke to my heart and said…

“Why do you think you know better than I do about what you need for your life? I have protected you from things you thought you needed before when I knew things you couldn’t see. Trust me, Lisa. I know what I’m doing.”

Chain = jerked. Message = heard.

It’s funny how God always has a way of helping me remember that the strong hand I have placed my life in has not released His grip on me for a single second along the way. Making that fact even more remarkable is the reality of how often I try to squirm out of it to run my own course.

Sometimes, that reminder comes with that sense of understanding, love and confirmation, spoken gently to my heart. Other times, it’s with that directness I need to be reminded of the sovereignty of Someone other than me.

Either way, the message is still the same.

God is in control.

He knows what He is doing.

His ways are not my ways.

His ways are best.