3.4.2007

John 16:21,22
A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.

Psalm 35:17,18
O Lord, how long will you look on? Rescue my life from their ravages, my precious life from these lions.
I will give you thanks in the great assembly; among throngs of people I will praise you.

Philippians 4:6-8
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. … Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Hello friends-

Last week, I had gone to a conference over in New York City and running around from that right after a different conference has left me pretty exhausted, and also a little sick because of my foolishness to not take a full day to rest.
As I think I have mentioned, I’d been going through Psalms with my boyfriend and it’s truly awesome to see the different things that God has to teach us all through them. I think one of the more striking things up to this point is that although the psalmist (typically, David) cries out to the Lord for deliverance and although he states how dreadful his current situation is, he is still able to turn it around and praise the Lord. If you look at David, a good portion of his time is spent being pursued by men who want to kill him – which I’m pretty sure that most of us have no idea what that must be like – yet, through David’s prayers (the psalms he writes), he is still able to praise the Lord and say that He is good. How crazy is that? But even more profound is that I know I’m quick to grumble and complain when something I want doesn’t go my way. It’s kind of convicting to see the life of David through God’s word, and I’m willing to bet that God did that on purpose to show us that although bad situations will come, we are to praise Him in the end. God is still amazingly good through our bad times and our good times; our situation may be changing constantly, but God is constantly the same all the time. He doesn’t change. I find this greatly comforting because then I know that I can trust God. Like the psalmist, you and I can cry out to God and put before Him our grief. We’re allowed to do that… we’re allowed to be fully emotional with God. I know that some of us go about our day thinking as though God is too high and mighty to really care about the deep gamut of our emotions. This simply isn’t true, for why would God give us emotions if He didn’t care about them?
Also like the psalmist, we are also able to praise the Lord through thick and thin. If we ask the Lord to give us faith and strength to do this, He will.
The balance of being emotional with God and being able to praise Him makes me think of something I learned at the conference I was at in NYC. Although the speaker was talking about art, I think the same is true for our entire lives: he said that we are to have Authenticity and Hope. To be Authentic is to be real, and to acknowledge pain and suffering (because those things are very real in our lives). On the flipside of the coin, however, is Hope. While we can acknowledge pain, we have hope because Jesus Christ bled, died, and rose to life again. There is life and beauty in the person of Christ. Living for Him and relying on Him allows us to seek what is good in our broken world, because He is the epitome of what is Good.

I pray that each of us would be refined by the Spirit in such a way that we would seek the Lord through our good days as well as our bad days. I ask that He would teach us to praise Him always, and give us strength to seek His face. I also pray the Holy Spirit would break down our pretenses with the Father, because we are allowed to have a full range of emotion with God. I pray that we would be enabled to acknowledge the brokenness of the world and our own lives, yet be instilled with the Hope of Christ and not despair. May these things be accomplished in all of us so that we can better reflect the light of Jesus in our lives.

In love and in Him,
Your sister,
Yvonne