Waking from Winter Slumber

"Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us.
"He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, That we may live before Him.
"So let us know, let us press on to know the LORD. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; And He will come to us like the rain, Like the spring rain watering the earth." Hos. 6:1-3

It is a yearly ritual, when the warmth starts to tease us for a day or two but winter won't quite let go. I know they will be there...

 I search for my tiny purple snow crocuses that faithfully return somewhere between winter and spring, even if only for a couple days. And there they were, waiting for me.

The day I took this picture, I was awaiting a big operation, one I was not relishing. Just a day or two later I was under the knife for more than four hours as the surgeon fixed my hiatal hernia and took biopsies. You see, my breath had become shorter and shorter as of late. Even walking up a flight of steps was so tiring. I've been winded for years, but not like this. I had this funny bump on my forearm for over a year and finally went to the dermatologist. I thought it might have been precancerous or something but it came back as sarcoidosis.

Sarcoidosis, how come I had never heard of it before?

Thought to be somewhat like an autoimmune condition, these non-caseating granulomas start to grow in your body. The main place they attack is the lungs. When I saw a CT scan filled with nodules, we wanted to find out for sure if this was sarcoidosis and not cancer. 

Now we have a diagnosis, and will try to treat it with the help of my pulmonologist. Hopefully  medicines will calm the little buggers from growing anymore or invading any more organs.Yet having this diagnosis has not made me cry, not really. After many years of choosing worry over fear, this time I choose not to fear, but to live in the reality of God's unfailing love.

 A couple of posts ago, I wrote about numbering my days. At the time, things hadn't flared up yet with my lungs. Now I see why I wrote it. The Lord really does want me to number them, because just like those little friends that popped up from the cold, barren ground to say hello to me for a day or two, human life is just as fragile.

"Man, who is born of woman, Is short-lived and full of turmoil. Like a flower he comes forth and withers. He also flees like a shadow and does not remain." Job 14: 1-2

The first couple of days home it was all I could do just to lie in the recliner most of the day. But it hit me, if my days are numbered (and they are) then what really matters?

There are too many choices and distractions, but One book and One Person whom my soul longs for. Every time I long for Him, He is there, faithful, while the things of the world seem so empty.

Outside my window today I hear the winds roaring, just like the March lion. My tiny friends are slumped over in the grass. 

I face a tough road ahead to try and get this mystery disease under control. But I thank Him for it all, because He is using it to awaken me from my own winter slumber,  to know what it means to abide in His love, to have that perfect love cast out all my fear.

His love has allowed this, I will not ask why. Just as those tiny crocus displays His glory, it is my prayer that I will too. 

If there is something big looming in your life right now, I know He will show Himself utterly faithful as you simply trust Him. He loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Skip the Regrets and Forge Forward in Faith in 2018

"What is man, that he could be pure? And he who is born of a woman, that he could be righteous?  Job 15:14

I am but a silly sheep in the great I AM 's  overflowing pasture, and I lose my way all the time. He rescues me daily from my own bad decisions and keeps me in life. (Psalm 66:9) Yet the Bible says I am pure if I am washed in the blood of the Lamb. I am without spot and blameless. I share in Christ's very righteousness.

"Yes, but....!" I've said in my heart a million times. My own heart wants to readily condemn me. The voice in my heart demands to be heard. Yet God is far greater than that voice...

For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. I John 3:21

 At certain times, like at night when I toss and turn, the thoughts of what I should have done and could have done come back to nip at my conscience. Finally, I am able to put the day into the wastebasket and He gives me rest.

The trouble is I know what is in my heart. I know that I fall short of God's righteous requirements. And Jesus does too.He knows I can never clean up the mess within my own heart. But somehow He still loves me, not because of anything desirable in me, but because of who and what He is. There is nothing in Him less than absolute love and perfection. He knows that if I spent the next billion years trying in my flesh to be like Him I would never produce even one good thing.

So He waits. He wants only for me to trust Him. He alone will produce anything good that comes from me by His grace. After all these years of walking with the Lord, I  only see more of my failures. That's a good thing, though. It's good to be weakened, to be reminded that I am only made of dust, so that I look only to my Perfect Savior. He too was made of dust, but now is in an incorruptible body that has triumphed for once and all over sins and failures and death.

Thank God, this Perfect Savior does not see me the way I see myself. I say in my heart, "But Lord, remember the time I did this, or though that, or didn't do what I thought You wanted me to?"

But that's ridiculous to entertain that, for He tells us:

For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more. Heb. 8: 12

If I believe the Bible, I must cast these thoughts off as vain imaginations. These feelings of guilt and regret do not make me more valuable or pious to God. They only serve to prove that my eyes are on myself and not on the Finished Work sacrifice that He made, once for all.

If He said it was finished, it was finished. No matter how bad I botch things, my sins, past, present and future have all been a part of what we could call Job's bag and thrown on Christ, once for all.

"My transgression is sealed up in a bag, And You wrap up my iniquity." Job 14:15

In the updated 1992 version of Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest today,  it gently and kindly reminded me, when once again I was ready to beat myself up for falling short that it is about looking ahead, not looking behind, as we reach this last day of the year 2017.

 "It is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return...Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him."