It's when you're breaking down with your insides coming out, that's when you find out what your heart is made of.
I know that it's been awhile since I've been on the dating scene, but heartbreak comes in so many forms, forms that I have been no stranger to over the last year. I missed Tyler's sermon on Sunday due to an ear infection, but Joe came home with some of the main pointers from the Mark 7 talk. One was that God tests us, and while we are not to test Him, He has every right to test us. Often, as evidenced through the life of Job, this testing comes with great heartbreak and pain. My own struggles are nothing in comparison to the hurts many people endure, they have been a time of laying open my heart to see what's there. Hebrews 4:12 states, "For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart."
When God cuts into His people, I honestly don't believe it is for the cutting itself or to cause needless pain. It is for the exposure of our hearts. God's word is life and as His word exposes our hearts for what they are, He breathes life into us to restore us. I believe God's testing us is another one of His acts of love, because when our worlds crash down around us, we finally see the stuff we are made of. Either we will see Jesus or we will see lies. When we see Jesus, we draw closer to Him, but when we see lies, Jesus comes with his truth, and we draw closer to Him.
I wrote on this back in August, but there is a verse from Lamentations 3 that I have been dwelling on for about seven years now: "The Lord is my portion, therefore I will wait for Him." When I first came across this verse, I had no concept of what this would look like in my life, but I knew I wanted it. I wanted God to be my portion, whatever that meant. Since that time, I've felt God's soul stripping work on my soul, not at all unlike what Eustice the Dragon encounters in C.S. Lewis's book, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." If you haven't read this, it is a beautiful and terrifying metaphor for God's oftentimes painful transforming work on us.
So what are we made of? This is what I wrote to Seanette, "Essentially, there is truth to the phrase, 'you are what you eat.' Do you fill yourself with truth, love, beauty and the words of Jesus, or do you fill yourself with lies, self hatred and deception? Because when your world comes crashing down around you, these are the things you will have to fall back on. It's been a year of heart exposure to me, and I've seen that my lifetime of "eating" has been exposed."
As God has pierced my heart, He has laid bare a mix of things. One is that the scripture hidden in my heart even from childhood has carried me through. In Psalm 119:11, David writes, "Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee." I grew up in a church that encouraged us to memorize scripture and I have had the joy of seeing this bless me later in life. Through the years, there have been moments when God's words flash through my heart to deliver the needed truth at the needed moment. These words have brought life in the midst of death and hope in the midst of severe disappointment.
Another is that I have been living out faulty hopes and incorrect self-identities. My friend Holly just wrote an amazing post on Hope, which the following quote is taken from,
For me, hope is very easily confused with expectations. Expectations will always be a part of us as human beings, it’s just how we function. But hope is something different. Hope is when I don’t understand why something isn’t happening according to my expectations but I trust in God’s plan. This doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings or thoughts, but my heart knows (and hopes) in God’s Sovereignty. So while I may be disappointed that my expectations were not met, I am not disappointed in my hope. This changes my attitude. This changes my actions. This changes my character: who I am. It makes me more like Christ.
I have found that I am not built to place hope in anything less than Christ alone. My identity is wrapped up in my hopes. If Christ is the only one who will not fail or disappoint, then to let anything else determine my worth or my identity is foolish and ultimately leads to destruction. My hopes in motherhood, my husband, friendships, success - they are better left to expectations.
The last thing I've seen is that the Lord is in fact my portion. When false hopes are stripped and the the heart is laid bare, everything but Jesus withers away. When I started reflecting on that verse from Lamentations 3, I thought I had to do something to make the Lord become my portion - as if I needed to clear my plate and wait for the main course - as if I had to grow my appetite for Him - as if I had to somehow make my soul yearn for Him. But I had it backwards. I was created with a yearning and appetite for Him. He has always been my portion. In His loving pursuit of me, God has cleared the plate so that I might to see Him and exclaim like David in Psalm 23, "You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever."
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