I started writing yesterday and I painted a pretty bleak picture. I used to sit around feeling sorry for myself that I had reached such a low place in my life. I was to the place the widow was, use up what was left and die.
From yesterday:
“So I went into Celebrate Recovery and I had nothing. I didn’t even have sticks to build a fire. I was starved and full of death. I was broken and beaten and empty. The extent of my journey has left me in pieces. I was trying desperately to pull them all together and make myself into something more than a pile of useless trash.
Then I was asked to share.”
I’m not writing to say that Celebrate Recovery is THE answer. It is merely where I found my answer and continue to find it every time I attend. God has many ways of providing the answer. But when I walked in the doors, I wasn’t looking for the answer anymore. I was using up the rest of what I had left so I could give up for good.
Like I said before, I was pity party central and I had hit bottom so hard that I was sure I was broken beyond repair. I was just waiting to be swept up and tossed wherever they toss the rest of the shattered people like me. I had tried to hold all the pieces together for so long and the pieces just kept splintering and breaking away in my hands adding more futility to my life when I thought it had reached it limit. I had reached my limit. I was done.
What a terrible place to be. This is the place God saved my life. I dropped my hands to the side and said, “God? You want this mess? You want it? For real? Here you go!”
I expected it to be too much for him. I expected him to fail. I knew in my heart that I had broken his creation beyond all repair. I didn’t deserve to be fixed because now I saw through the lies I had told myself and knew that it wasn’t God that made this mess, it was me. I had simply usurped God’s authority until his purpose for my life was impossible to achieve.
Once again God proved me wrong. In the past, God had started the healing process and I had taken over again saying, “Thanks for the hand, God, but I’ve got this now.” My thick bonehead finally realizes that I will never had this. I wasn’t designed to control my own destiny. I was designed to be transformed and finished by God and his amazing grace. I can’t make myself into more than what God will create from me. If I want to run faster, jump higher and fly, only God can do that for me. I can barely get my backside to the couch in the morning.
Isaiah 40:30 Even youths will become weak and tired, and young men will fall in exhaustion. 31 But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.
When I am tired and weary, when I am about to faint from the stress of life and the dulling drain on my life energy from depression and fear, when anger eats away at me until I am at my breaking point, when my wings are clipped by my flaws and defects, when I can barely walk, when exhaustion makes the next breath a real challenge, God simply says, “Trust me.”
Satan’s greatest lie is, “There is immense power in yourself!” I’ve rode that self-powered bandwagon to the point of wanting this life to be over. There is nothing at the end of that trail but a bunch of wrecked bandwagons and bones picked clean by Satan’s vultures. It is where men go to die.
God challenges me to do the impossible, to reach farther than man alone can reach, to change what man cannot, to perform miracles through God’s awesome power and grace.
Some mornings I sit down at this desk to write and no words come. I stare blankly listening to the coffee pot gurgle and chug. Then I look in the mirror at the miracle, the man that laid in the land of brokenness and shame, hopelessness and fear and see a face that is ready to face a day of new discovery. Suddenly, there aren’t enough words to express what I feel.
I’m not a special kind of miracle. I’m a simple miracle, the kind that God does all the time, the kind God is aching to do for you who are sitting in that place where there is no hope and no future
I’m no longer holding myself together desperately afraid that the Frankenstein’s monster I have created will simply collapse into a pile of useless parts. My hands are free to do what God asks, my feet are free to go where he leads and my heart is able to withstand being broken for his cause over and over again.
I’ve got so far to go, so far to grow but I am not heading toward death even as this body refuses to fight the aging process. My future holds only life and the mystery of what God’s miracle will do in it today and tomorrow.
New Hope for Dry Bones 