Wrestling and Walking With A Limp

We gathered this week, these brave women and me.  These women who are pulling up their chairs, opening up God’s book and questioning their theology and it’s relationship to their own dailies. This road is not easy, this asking God to show Himself.  Because He does, He delights in answering that plea…and then…what do you do with that?  God I mean?  When He reveals Himself and truth that is so real that it wrestles you to the ground?

We planted our lives in Genesis 32…

God?

He is full of loving-kindness and faithfulness.

He is the only source of true blessing.

He sometimes has to dislocate us to get us to the blessing.

He is quite big enough to handle our wrestling things out with Him.

He is the one, after all, who initiates the wrestling match.

Jacob?

After wrestling through the night and in excruciating pain from his hip being dislocated is asked to let go.  But could he?  I imagine him clinging, using God just to stay upright and saying, “No! I will not let you go until you bless me.”  What a picture to stay in a clinging position and say No, I will not let you go in the midst of great pain and complete uncertainty.  When asked, “what is your name”, what went though his mind?  His father had asked him that same question some twenty years earlier and he lied!  His name, Jacob, means supplanter, one who takes what he wants using whatever means necessary to get it, by force and or deception.  He had lived up to his name when God found him alone and cloaked in the darkness of night.  In his mind did he attach his answer to what he had done in the past or what he had become in the present?  Don’t we?  How often do I indentify myself with my past mistakes or what I do, or even successes?  Jacob was given a new name, a name that would identify him with God.  His life was preserved, snatched, delivered, and forever changed.  Ours too upon the first encounter with God and multiple days and wrestling encounters along the way. He is constantly wrestling the old out of us so that we can embrace Him and our new name. Oh teach me to live in His identification alone!  Jacob would walk the rest of his life with a limp as a result of the wrestling. A constant reminder, step by step, of what God did on that day.  What’s so wrong with a limp?  I think we are so concerned that everyone thinks we have it all together that we could never let someone see us limp.  Truth?  What we really need to see is each other walking this thing called life, this road full of joys, sorrows, pain, highs and lows, with a limp!

One step at a time.

Blessings,

Kim

Genesis 32, Isaiah 43:1, 2 Corinthians 5:17, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11

  

The Question

I don’t even remember when I was first confronted with the question.  All I remember is that it messed with my Christian box that I had everything neatly packed into, along with my expectations and my own perceptions.  There was a time that I had it on a 3X5 card and the time that I had it written on a chalkboard in our home all with the attempts to be sincere in my searching and then it would slip again out of my consciousness.  What is the question?  It is this…Does my reality match my theology?  Even typing it makes me uneasy, because all too often I know the answer.

I have the sweet privilege this fall to study God’s word with a group of ladies that are willing to ask the same question.  We are jumping into scripture together asking to see God more clearly, know Him more fully and to allow Him to form His theology in us. Desiring to not just have more knowledge about God, but to actually know God.  We looked at Genesis 22:1-18 this week, where Abraham is asked to take Isaac and sacrifice him to God.  It is such a hard and brutal story.  And yet, just like our God, beauty flows from something that is unimaginable. 

We grappled with how Abraham loved Isaac and that the word love is the same word in Deuteronomy 6:5, where we are told to love the Lord our God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your might. A love that is directed to and reserved for God, a love that says, “You have all of me”.  We rejoiced with a ram caught in the thicket by it’s horns and recognized that our redemption has been accomplished because a horn of salvation has been raised up for us…Thank You Jesus! (Luke 1:68-69) We squirmed as we wondered why Abraham’s confession that, “they would worship and return”, knowing what Hebrews 11:17-19 tells us about his faith, wasn’t enough to stop what was in play.  Why did they have to walk up the mountain, build an alter, and get to the point of a knife being positioned to plunge into Isaac’s body?   Only to admit that we too have a disconnect between what we say and think and how we respond.  So when life starts to crumble or a circumstance brings us to our knees we don’t confront it with the truth of who God is and our knowledge is passive and not active.   Then, the disconnect remains between my reality and my theology.  Life requires action and not just words.

We saw God this morning in all His glory; His desire to pull us into a closer relationship with Himself, through the harshness.  His beautiful provision, His name is Provider! His desire to rescue, which has always been His plan.  We heard the name Jesus whispered, well shouted loudly really, in an only son being offered, in a ram caught in a thicket, and in a substitute sacrifice.

There has been a paragraph on a page in a book that intersected my life a couple of years ago.  I have it highlighted in bright pink and I have read it multiple times in the past year of life.  In speaking about great women theologians it reads; “They were serious about knowing Him and studied the Scriptures with that intention.  They nurtured their faith on the truth of God’s character so that, instead of starting over from scratch in each new situation, wondering if God’s goodness had expired or if He had somehow lost control, these women fixed their eyes on Him and actually put their weight down on the truth.  No matter what the challenge or the adversity their ironclad conviction was that He is always good, is always on His throne, is always working, always knows what He is doing, and that His love for them never stops.  They were not passive with their knowledge but consciously took it up and confronted life with it.  Their hearts were strong because they were sure of God.  It made a difference in their running, and what is more because their eyes were fixed on Jesus, they were better wives, mother, daughters, and friends.” From: When Life and Beliefs Collide by Carolyn Custis James

I want to be that kind of woman!

To those that I’m walking this out with….thanks for journeying with me and I’m sorry that it doesn’t always look pretty! To those who are reading this and are on the same quest….hey sister!

Learning what it means to put my weight down on truth.

Blessings,

Kim