THE STRUGGLE OF THE HEART

Have you ever noticed you can be happy and yet dissatisfied all at the same time?

My life is one of both thrill and reach.  I am thrilled over the abundance of right now while I am driven to reach for more of what God addresses as valuable....for I have surely not arrived.  God is so big and His work so demanding I will always be in kindergarten.  First grade, for me, is out of reach.  Kindergarten II and III?  Possibly.

My heart struggles with this Kingdom System of His because I know to do things which will bless God and those He would call through my faith.  Yet, I don't do them.  I believe them....but just don't fulfill them.

For example, I am learning daily the increasing truth that to be effective we must release more and more of us.  We sing none of self and all of Thee, but seldom have I heard it in actualization.  I believe we basically sing such as an ideal goal.

Oh I've had spurts of giving it all.  Leaving my frail security to go to preaching school was truly cutting the limb off behind me.  This was terrifying.  Moving to Memorial Drive in 1977 caused me extreme anguish.  The only reason I did it is because I was convinced God wanted it so.  I reached a point I felt I had no choice.

Today?  Well today is more of the same....heart struggles.  Our world still desperately needs our help, our compassion...our dying to self.  It needs it badly.  I think Jesus has made it clear.  The world cannot come to life in Him unless someone dies to self.  The more death...the more hope of massive life.  The more we save ourselves hiding behind the names of good ministries, the deader earth becomes.

This creates a giant struggle of the heart.  The true church--the one Jesus is continuing to build--is not the one with the correct shingle over the door nor the correct "decent and orderly" worship assembly.  It is to find some living immune to the ridicule, hardship, and luring call of the world while tenderly caring for the poor, the lame, the blind in the name of Jesus-the-Healer.

I don't believe this post makes one's struggle easier.  But maybe it might pull a few hearts together in the bond-awareness that we are not alone in this turmoil.  Same Kind of Different As Me, Rees Howells Intercessor, The Hole in Our Gospel, Radical, and A Framework for Understanding Poverty clears our Christian sinuses. 

Thanks be to God for His favor to never pull back His persistent call to lose ourselves by helping others that we....might really find ourselves to be who we hunger to be.