I may have digressed recently from my original intent to include you in on the healing process God's taking me through, though honestly everything I've written relates to this specific season of the journey.
God's been challenging me to see Him as faithful. Upon a friend's confusion about why I need God to speak again, and in a different way, when I believe I've already heard Him, just so that I can really believe it is from Him, I questioned what has motivated that need for the extra confirmation. The answer was pretty obvious.
Based on my past experiences, I have a very well-developed theory that people, and therefore God, over-promise and under-deliver. Forgive me if this is too personal, but writing it here is really beneficial for me. When I was a kid, my dad would make all sorts of promises that for most people aren't that big of a deal. Promises to pick us up on the weekend, to call during the week, to call at all. As a teenager, I would go months without hearing from him (I mean, CT to OH is a long ways away, but still) and during my senior year in high school, I bluntly sent him a letter asking if he wanted a relationship with me. I had just become a Christian and was going through a really bold stage of my life, and I felt a need to know where my dad and I stood. I was sick of expecting him to be a legitimate dad and getting disappointed repeatedly, and as a result buying the lie that I wasn't worth his attention, time, or even his love. He called a very short time later, and communication with him was actually relatively consistent through the first couple years of college. But it tapered off again, to where I literally spoke with him maybe three times since last summer.
I remember being 8ish and watching out the window of my mom's apartment waiting for my dad to arrive to pick me and my sister up for the weekend. When the time got close to when he was supposed to arrive, I would start predicting, "Five more blue cars coming from one direction and it'll be him." I don't know how many times he actually did show up, but I do know that he frequently did not. As this disappointment grew, I got sick of expecting him to arrive and one time decided that even if he did show up, I wasn't gonna go. He came that day, and my sister spent the weekend with him. At some point in all of this, I gave up on believing he actually wanted to spend time with me. I became a skeptic when people made promises.
Being skeptical about promises has served me well to 'predict the future.' As my mom's gotten in relationships and it's gotten difficult, (like all relationships always do) I've decided it's not gonna last. Embarrassingly, my mom got real sick of me, starting at age 12, telling her "I told you so." It's incredibly unfortunate that I've been right all these times. I mean, when I finally find myself in the marriage relationship I've desired my entire life, my skepticism is gonna come out after every argument. While I started realizing that just because a relationship goes through a tough patch doesn't mean it can't last in my mom's last relationship, it still didn't last. Now though, this skepticism is really messing with my relationship with God.
I know God to be faithful to His promises, and let's be honest, I'm really good at hunting down evidence of His promises being met! I remember as a new Christian reading the major and minor prophets in the Old Testament and deciding that a bunch of the prophecies were referring to events from the Holocaust and how God brought the Jews back to their promised land after WWII. Don't judge! It began my understanding of God's faithfulness to His chosen people. As the prophecies about Jesus unfolded at the same time I was learning about Jesus for the first time, I remember being completely transfixed by it all! Now, I have no doubt about my eternal destiny and Jesus' evident return. However, when I think God's communicated something specific about the direction of my life, that while scripture supports God speaking, it doesn't lay it out as clearly as I'd like, I find myself fighting against believing it. While I have evidence of God having spoken, and even the confirmation of peace (and more) that it was God speaking, I don't see the practical evidence of it actually happening. Now, when God says something about my future I'm not particularly excited about or invested in, His simple direction and peace is more than enough for me to trust Him. At the moment, God's challenging me to trust in His promises about something I actually really want, and it has thoroughly brought out all of my past wounds left by my father's broken humanity and my mother's taste in unreliable men.
Last weekend, God shared a part of His plan for my life with me. This coming weekend I'm hoping He heals a lot of the emotional scars left so many years ago that Satan desires to continually point and laugh at.
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