Beautiful is in the Making...

So this morning I woke up with this longing to go back to how things were. I long for the loyalty of relationships. I very much dislike the thought of having to start over, sometimes even if it means giving up something better in order to hold on to that comfort. This longing in my heart was immediately countered with this phrase: “The Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt too.”

We know that story third person. It’s easier for us to see the foolishness of the Israelites longing to go back to Egypt. I mean, they had seen the miracles of God going before them, they had been giving the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey that was to be theirs. Wouldn’t the journey to get there be seen as better than the harsh slavery of Egypt? But consider this for a moment. All their memories of Egypt were not bad. In fact, at one point Egypt was exactly where God had led them to be. 

Let’s go all the way back to the story of Joseph. God gave him dreams that foretold of a time when his family would bow down to him. Through a series of events, these dreams came to fulfillment. Joseph’s family and descendants therefore came to live in Egypt. Egypt was exactly where God had led them to be.

So how could God now be telling them otherwise? If God had led them there, perhaps they never should have left. In the midst of the desert and seeing no future ahead of them, I’m sure these are some of the thoughts that were going through the Israelites minds. And rightly so. It had to have been more than just the complaint of uncomfort that caused them to seek to go back to the land of Egypt. It was confusion as well. If God had led their people into Egypt in the first place, why would He now be leading them out? Maybe they were never supposed to leave.

So, did God really want them to leave Egypt? Yes! Because He wanted to take them to the promised land, the home originally set aside for them.

So why the need for Egypt at all? If God knew that they would become slaves and have to suffer, why would he lead them to Egypt in the first place?

Remember. There was a famine in the land during the time that Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt. If they had not gone to Egypt (and by God’s divine grace of setting Joseph second to Pharaoh there) their whole family surely would have died from the famine. And there would be no story of the promised land to tell today. No inhabitants left to occupy it.

So why did God want them to go to Egypt?

To save their lives.

Sometimes God has to lead us on detours to get us to the promised land. Because sometimes (and most often the case) the straight shot to the promised land is hindered by many a things. It may appear that He has led us through unnecessary pain. But if only we could see the whole picture we would realize that He did so to save us from never getting there at all. Remember the promises. God has promised good to those who love him and obey his commands. Don’t be confused and hold on to Egypt because it was where God once led you, thank Him for leading you there because at one point it saved your life, and then be ready to follow Him all the way to the promised land.

“If the Titanic was made to sink
Then so was my heart
For I made sure it was impenetrable
Oh, what a wretched man I am
Who will save me from this flesh
Paul whispers in my ear,
“Oh, don’t worry my friend
You’re in good company.”
Poets before me have tried
to measure this love
And if 40,000 brothers cannot
with all of their quantity of love
make up this sum
Then how can my heart contain this mass?
It would only burst at the seams into
a million tender pieces
So what then
What good is a broken heart to You?
Could you even hear my heart from there?
And like a father assuring his son
to come home,
“Oh my son, it’s enough, it’s enough.”
So who am I to accept this grace
that just falls like rain
‘Cause we all know I chose to lay
my head in this desert
But like a fish out of water
We only know then what it means
to be parched
So if Christ is alive, the love,
and the groom
Then take heed my friends
For chivalry is not dead
For I know no other lover who would
have met me here in this place
So I awake and I rise from my bed
of complacency
Oh, my God I’ve been sleeping
with a corpse!
Oh, and these bed sores they still
rest in my bones
Oh, how I’ve made a beautiful dance
with this cadaver but my audience
is appalled
Oh, how strong these tendons
How they desperately need to rip
from this ancient Adam
So light up the sky and
Set me a flame
Burn this bone and tissue
For I no longer want to be
entangled in this sinew
That hinders my reach towards You”

(Source: Spotify)

I had this freakish dream the other night. It was different. Its feel wasn’t like other dreams. I was in this place getting ready to face an oncoming attack. Everything was so solid for a dream. I could feel my thoughts and emotions. It was that sinking feeling that you had no idea if you were going to live to see another day. It’s a hard to explain feeling. It’s one thing to have it talked about it, but it’s another to be there in that moment having the realization that you really may not live through this.

There I was lying flat on my belly with a gun in hand peering out waiting on our attackers. Then they came. Few in numbers, advancing slowly. Yet there was something strange about it…

I took my shot. And a feeling I never will forget overwhelmed me. A feeling of sheer dumbfounded terror that comes from witnessing something you never would have anticipated. As I shot down one of the enemy, in dying, it produced multiples of itself…fifteen, twenty, morphed out from around the one that had been killed. It was terrifying. And in that moment in the dream, one of these creatures (I call them creatures because though they were human, yet they were somewhat mutated as the multiplied), just as if it were a movie close-up slow-mo, turned it’s face toward me and locked eyes with me with this evil look of satisfaction seeing that he had finally caught us at a loss.

So here we were in near shock of what we are witnessing and only having moments to figure out how in the world do we conquer these enemies…if we continue to shoot, they will only multiply, yet if we do nothing, the original attack will still overcome us. Then I saw that we were near these prison cells and in the chaos of the fight we (and whether it was me or someone else I don’t know) slung one of the enemies into a cell and locked it in. We had found a loop hole. They could not be killed lest they multiply into more, yet they could be contained and locked up. And in that moment I caught a tiny bit of hope that this battle was not futile, but that there was a way to conquer this freakish ploy of the enemy.

It was at about that time that I awoke from the dream. Oddly I didn’t wake with fear or anxiety as I often do when having had a nightmare. But I recall having this feeling of hating not being able to completely do away with the enemy. We could lock them up but we couldn’t kill them lest it got worse. And that didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to be rid of the evil, I couldn’t bare to live with the evil locked up in our midst, though powerless, still there and alive.

I pictured the city restored and beautiful again, people living their lives in freedom and happiness, none of them seemed to be fazed by the fact that there was a terrible evil locked up in prison cells beneath them. It almost angered me that none of them seemed to care. Don’t they know that the evil is still alive? Don’t they know that it lives beneath them? I cannot be ok until it is done away with completely. But then I realized this: that sometimes I have to be ok with just locking the evil up. There is some evil that I am unable to kill. There will come a day, but till then I have to be ok with locking it up and living in freedom. The more I try to kill the evil the more it multiplies. Sometimes wisdom is to lock it up, throw away the key, and live on in freedom knowing that I did the only thing possible to evade the evil from destroying me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8nzVdWXF-g&feature=share

littlethingsaboutgod:

“David committed spiritual adultery way before physical adultery. He lost sight of the beauty of God, then found the beauty of Bathsheba. He didn’t sin and lose the joy of his salvation. He lost the joy of his salvation, then he sinned.”

—Paige Brown

(Source: imawarriorpoet)