Day 120 - Numbness is Living Death

I wish I could say that today was great. I wish I could say that I spent the morning worshiping. If I had, I’m sure the day would have been better. It’s not that today was bad, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t good either. It was just a day. A day of work, a day of fighting loneliness, but not even realizing you are fighting it until it’s too late. Probably the fact that it was raining this afternoon and I didn’t get to run didn’t help. These are the kind of days I have to make myself fight against. It’s this kind of day that will rob me of my joy without even knowing it. I can’t allow myself to have days like this. Days like these will grow into weeks and months if you are not careful. No pain and no joy, just numbness. It seems OK until you realize what you lost. A day like today takes joy away and replaces it with nothing. I really believe it is better to have sharp pain that last just a little while and then is replaced by the joy of God’s presence than to have a day with no pain, but no joy. Pain shows that there is life. Numbness is absence of life. Today numbness slipped into my life. This may not be the first time, but it is the first time I have recognized it for what it is. Numbness is the absence of life. It is death. So today I realized that a spirit of death is trying to make me numb. If we want to experience the beauty of a rose, we have to smell it and look at it. We risk the pain of the thorns. All of this is part of life. To maintain life, I have to fan the flame of the Spirit in my life. I’m used to school doing that. We would have worship at least on Monday nights, sometimes Tuesdays also. Just because I had to go to work doesn’t give me an excuse not to press into His presence.
It wasn’t until I sat down in my rocking chair to write did I realize what had been happening to me. As I sat down, I realized I couldn’t put on the usual music. I needed something more livelily to worship as I wrote. As I started to sing and write Holy Spirit revealed all of this to me. Think of this. How many days do we waste just being numb? How many of us live most of our lives in a sate of numbness? We are not really living, we are existing. I want to live! I will take the pain to feel the joy. Are you willing? Jesus was willing to endure the pain to experience the joy. The joy is experiencing the Father’s love. It’s releasing that love to others. That Joy is seeing the Kingdom of God manifest itself into life’s situations. The pain is when we lose the battles. We know that we win the war, but we don’t always win the battles. But even when we lose the values, we must cling to our core beliefs. My experience doesn’t affect my belief. The ultimate core belief that I cling to is that God is Good. His goodness is defined in the life of His Son Jesus the Christ. Jesus is perfect theology. He healed everyone who came to Him. He did not judge sinners. He hated sin, but loved the sinner. He hang out with sinners, and spoke against the religious. He did not punish sinners. He would not be popular in most of our churches today. I can imagine that if you looked in His eyes you would be lost in a deep pool of liquid love.
Sunday Morning during worship we were singing a song about the potter’s wheel. It was about allowing the Lord to mold us and to make us, so that we would be transformed into more of His image. How are we molded? Some would say it is through brokenness. I believe that is true to an extent. But if God is good, will He break us? Good question but there is no good answer. It’s really one of the mystery questions. However, this is what I believe about that. Bad things happen to all of us, just and unjust. We live in a fallen world. Even with prayer, declarations and faith, sometime, somewhere we are all going to experience a loss. It’s how we respond to that loss that determines our destiny. Do we cling to the core belief that God is Good. Do we instead think that He caused it to mold us? I choose the former. He can use anything. ALL things do work together for good. But that doesn’t mean that He arranged everything. So how we respond determines how we are molded.
If you have ever seen the potter mold clay, what is the primary ingredient that is added to the clay? It is water. Water makes the clay moldable. If the clay is too dry, it will just break. To be made into the image that the potter desires, the clay must be mixed with water. The water of the Spirit is Love. His love poured out on us is like water to clay. It makes us pliable. His love is what allows us to be molded. As we embrace His love, we are able to be shaped into the image He has for us. We can’t reject His love; we have to choose to press into Him. When we allow numbness to sip into our life, we keep the water of His love from flowing into us. We slowly become dry and less pliable. We don’t even know it, until we cannot be used and molded. No, we have to embrace life. We have to embrace pain as well as joy. We have to make sure that numbness is not allowed to infect us, because that brings death.