Your Grace Still Amazes Me

Yesterday morning during my meditation time I read the thoughts in My Utmost from the previous day that I had not had time to read due to intense preparation for the afternoon ceremony. As I suspected before I ever read it, God had placed an important message in that days reading for my heart knowing ahead of time what would happen on that day. Here are some excerpts from May 5:

Salvation is the great thought of God, not an experience... Never preach the experience; preach the great thought of God behind. When we preach we are not proclaiming how man can be saved from hell and be made moral and pure; we are conveying good news about God.

...Never sympathize with a soul who finds it difficult to get to God, God is not to blame. It is not for us to find out the reason why it is difficult, but so to present the truth of God that the Spirit of God will show what is wrong....

If Jesus ever gave us a command He could not enable us to fulfill, He would be a liar; and if we make our inability a barrier to obedience, it means we are telling God there is something He has not taken into account. Every element of self-reliance must be slain by the power of God. Complete weakness and dependence will always be the occasion for the Spirit of God to manifest His power.

That last sentence went straight to my heart producing a powerful wave of emotion and confirmation. I had been reminded of that by other people even before we went into this and God confirmed it in this writing on just the day that it applied the most.

I felt terribly inadequate, out of time and emotionally fragile going into the afternoon service. I had not found anyone to coordinate the event and so I was under tremendous pressure to answer lots of questions about material details that I could not deal with. A number of important elements were forgotten in the rush that made me feel extremely sad after it was over. But I keep reminding myself that this was God's opportunity to do something important in spite of all our blunders and forgetfulness and missed cues. I must be very careful not to dwell on all the mistakes but to remain in faith that something unseen but superseding of what was obvious took place that day and the visible results may or may not be seen for a long time. We did as much as we could do with the resources and time that we had and God must glorify His name in His way and time. We simply provided the human ingredients and permission for Him to do His much greater thing whatever that may be.

Another aspect of the aftermath of this event was my own personal life-long confusion as to how to relate to compliments or appreciation. From a very early age something about this got twisted, I suppose at least partly from the over-conservative bias of the religious culture I was immersed in. I remember feeling that to receive any compliments or praise for nearly anything was immediately labeled by my mind as flattery and therefore sinful and wrong. I know that people when they hear this feel the impulse to simply correct me and tell me that it isn't so, but my heart cannot receive those words as truth. Even telling myself those things does not change my automatic reaction. I always feel some degree of guilt associated with accepting compliments without some kind of protest or disclaimer.

This habit (or coping mechanism) of course, has the effect of discouraging everyone from further attempts to affirm me. This in turn tends to make me feel more isolated and introverted and discouraged in my spirit. That in turn makes people feel more distant from me and unappreciated for their attempts to reach out to me and the whole thing remains a vicious spiral that perpetuates itself throughout my life. What I am describing here is not an attempt at self-justifying or solicitation for pity, it is simply a description of what I am observing as a weak spot in my character that has contributed to the starved condition of my heart over most of my lifetime.

Just writing it out makes me feel very frightened at what others will think. Usually they will either try to correct my thinking with obvious logic or they will pull back and leave me to my fate deciding that nothing they do or say will make a difference anyway. I am back to staring at another very vulnerable area of my damaged heart and taking what feels like a terrifying risk of exposing myself in public by even talking about it. It seems like whatever the “solution” might be, it will not be woven into my personality and character through the normal methods that we typically use for correction. This is very much a heart condition and it seems to me that it can only be addressed from other hearts who are equally open and vulnerable but also are deeply caring and persistent. That is also what my heart wants to be when it grows up.

So how do I finish this post from here? I don't know. That's the problem with this medium of communication – it is one-sided in the present sense and makes whatever dialog is initiated very slow and tedious. But this impatience with its limitations is probably God's built-in incentive for me to grow beyond this crutch and become more open to more active means of interaction while remaining open with my heart. I am slowly beginning to learn how to experience intense emotions while still trying to remember who I am and how to act and respond without being controlled by triggers. I will certainly be more happy and satisfied when I become more proficient and capable of those skills.

Here's how this post must be finished. I am so glad that God showed up two days ago as I invited Him to do. As usual it was not necessarily the way I would preferred to have seen it; we are always clamoring for the spectacular and the supernatural external displays of glory. But Elijah was taught an important lesson about this when God ran him through a training session of how to hear God's voice. After missing the real thing in a number of spectacular displays of frightening power, Elijah felt the familiar urges of the quiet voice inside his head that he had been hearing and following for most of his life. God is certainly capable of the spectacular displays, but the long-term heart changes are effected more permanently in the quiet impressions of the insistent love and healing of that sweet Spirit that is molding us back into the image of God for which we were designed.

As the room was being cleaned up and the commotion was beginning to subside, my heart was reaching out for God trying to figure out where to connect with Him. I put on some music that had been missed during the program and walked away from the commotion to listen to the words and music coming out of the speakers and immediately my spirit responded in worship and a sense of peace. This song never fails to deeply stir my heart and I wanted to just be swallowed up in the truth of its words. “Your grace still amazes me – Your love is still a mystery. Each day I fall on my knees, 'cause Your grace still amazes me.” The musical arrangement of this by Phillips, Craig and Dean is one of the most beautiful and powerful messages to the heart that I have ever heard through music. When I sing along with the words while engaging my heart to express them in real time directly to my God, the message becomes very real and my heart feels released to be free and alive for a few moments in the very presence of God. I cannot describe it accurately in this limited medium, but those who have lived from their heart at least on occasion know what I am talking about to some extent.

Throughout the rest of the evening my mind kept feeling an intense desire for something, but it seemed that every line of thought that I looked at was immediately dissatisfying and I would turn to another. I felt very spiritually and increasingly emotionally hungry and I wanted to find what it was that would satisfy it best . What I found was that when I would simply stop my thinking and ignore the external distractions and simply focus consciously on God's presence in quietness, it was only then that I felt like this emptiness was starting to be satisfied and fed. I suppose, looking back on it now, that it was an important part of the peace/joy cycle that our brains and hearts are designed for in order to thrive. I was coming off the peak of the joy part of the cycle, the intense “glad to be together in intense sharing of emotions with another”, and now I equally needed the peace part of the cycle to balance me, the quiet time together just marinating in the presence and love of God without words or dialog. Yes, it is very true for me, “Your grace still amazes me – Your love is still a mystery”.