There is a flow when life works.
When life doesn’t work, we live in that dark, difficult place of pain, anger, fear and depression. Then we wonder:
- What can I do to make life work?
- How can I get past these bad feelings and live again?
Jesus understood what it is like to be in that bad place. You know what he said?
You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
What in the world does this mean? When you are in the dark place, you really don’t feel blessed. You feel alone, frustrated. It is easy to feel the negative – people’s criticism feels like arrows. Their negativity like grenades.
To understand what Jesus is saying, we need to take a quick look at Is 57:15 – this is God speaking:
I live in the high and holy places,
but also with the low-spirited, the spirit-crushed,
And what I do is put new spirit in them,
get them up and on their feet again.
When you are in that place of pain – that place where what you feel is more real than what you know – then you are ready to have God do a miracle for you.
It is time to admit – you can’t fix things.
I first faced this wall when I was 17, my first year at college. I sat in a the dean of women’s office, feeling at the end of my rope. A call and a short walk later, she had me in the head counselor’s office. The counselor was brilliant, and didn’t wait for my “woe is me” saga. He looked me in the eye and asked “how long have you been bulimic?” He jumped to the main thing I was using to control my pain – an eating disorder. I thought I needed someone to help me not feel bad. He knew that he couldn’t help me until I stopped trying to fix things myself.
What are you doing to try to fix things yourself? Stop it. God is with you – He wants to put a new spirit in you. He can get you up and living with purpose and energy again.
You have a unique purpose here on earth, but you feel that frustration and pain because you are not living in the flow of God’s purpose. It may be something major – like the sins we like to talk about, but the real sin in life is trying to do things on our own instead of trusting God to straighten out the crooked places and infuse life at just the right moment.
If you are in a place of pain, I would love to pray with you. Just email me, or comment below.
4 Responses
Hi Kim,
Greetings!!
Very aptly said…!!
God Bless
Really good article Kim! Thank you!
Owen, thank you for your honest response. Whereas you are right that the Harvard study did not find prayer making a difference, other studies have shown otherwise (see: http://www.youmeworks.com/sendablessing.html for one).
The real question, for me, is this – who would I rather use as a resource – finite me, or infinite God? I have limited resources and even more limited vision. God can see things I can’t see. His perspective is very different from mine, and He, being infinite, has access to a lot more information and resources. Now, either I control my life, or God does. In actuality, I always control my life because I maintain the ability to act, will, resist or go in the flow that God provides. I prefer to make use of the Resources provided and become all that I was created to be.
Thank you for taking the time for conversation.
So what you’re saying is if someone is actually trying to make positive changes in their life, through action, not through prayer (we’ve established those yield no results) that they are wasting their time and should just confide in Jesus? How completely deluded are you? How insecure do you have to be to refuse to take responsibility for your actions? Do you honestly believe that you need a relationship with something that no one has ever seen to make you a better person? Of course not. Please for the sake of the world, we need people to stop thinking like you