Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.
"You are faithful, God, you are faithful."~Matt Redman
How shall I never know the full extent of how faithful the Lord has been to walking with me every step of the way of my life. Lately, I've been compelled to look back at old prayer journals and of course I am more than amazed seeing how the Lord answered so many prayers penned years ago and have long since been forgotten. My Lord obviously didn't forget because he continues to answer them, even though I did.
I LOVE writing. Obviously... I blog quite a bit. :) But I think I connect best with the Lord when I write, or blog, or journal. It helps me to see what the Lord sees as I try to understand my own thoughts whilst jotting them down and sorting them out. I love that the Lord wrote me a whole big letter, 66 books long that proclaims His faithfulness again and again. And then, He's wrote me. My book. My story. Just one more book of His faithfulness. By God's grace, I was inspired to start writing out my prayers into journals so that I would be able to see how He worked in my life a little better.
This is a picture of some of the prayer journals I've filled going back as far as 2006...I didn't even fully surrender my heart to the Lord til Nov. 12th 2008. I know that date because I wrote it down and I remember exactly where I was and at what time when I did. It's funny that I kept a prayer journal before I gave the Lord my heart. But I think, mostly, at the time I started I didn't know what I thought of God. I didn't know if I even believed Him to be real. Perhaps that is why I started with writing letters to Him in a book, as I believed him to be distant at best (if He really was real) and snail mail, hand written letters, seemed like the best way to get a hold of Him, as He could read them at His own pace, if He had time. He wasn't obligated to listen to me say words, or stick around listening to me make endless request as I would last minute remember to pray whilst drifting off to sleep.
I suppose it started as an experiment. If God was real, I wanted to be able to see it. On paper. And my life would be the proof, since my life was the most real thing I could compare anything to. I didn't really know what to think of the Bible or things people said. I mean, I grew up hearing about God and I'd been told a billion times over that God was real and God was love. But as I didn't experience those things to be true in my life, I don't think I believed it in the deepest places of my heart, even though I accepted them as a truth of some sort.
And now, more than a thousand pages of letters to God later, I would say that, with my life as proof, I am loved by the most faithful God in the universe.
I was reading this morning in one of my journals from 2011 just a little blip of an entry that was obviously written whilst being on a retreat with my ministry and must have come after spending a little time alone with the Lord. It's dated October 1, 2011 and it simply says,
"In the last few minutes I feel like God was telling me to abandon my pride and my dreams of......
and focus wholly on Him. He wants to be close to me too, but he can't when I build walls. He wants to give me joy and life"
Funny how I wrote that and seemingly forgot it soon after. A year exactly to the date later, God decided it was time to tear the walls down. With wrecking ball, bulldozer, and all of His best demolition equipment on hand, my pride and my dreams were removed for me. And I have my 2012 prayer journals that write of the pain and brokenness of it all and I dare say I wrote that I didn't see it coming.
But I have experience joy and life beyond what I could have ever imagined in the months since then. I could tell you story after story about how the Lord comforted and sang over me and quieted me with His love.
Recently, I was interviewing a close friend for one of my final papers and since I was asking her about things that help her to stay positive, we got on the subject of how being positive coincides with being peaceful. And then it was like real life dot-to-dot game as we realized that when you are peaceful, you are also patient. And patience helps you to be gentle, and being gentle helps you to be kind, and being kind goes with being loving and love goes with goodness and, well, I think you know where I'm going with this.
Faithfulness is one of the fruits of the Spirit. I have had discussion with friends on what fruits we need to work on more in our lives. I think I've come to realize that it doesn't quite work that way. Not one fruit of the Spirit at a time anyways. I know there are times when we've said something like, "Well, I need to be more patient" or "I need to have more self-control." But it's not like one is an apple, one is a banana and one is an orange. I think they are all the same fruit, one packed with every essential vitamin and health feature you could want. If you find that you are missing one thing, such as patience or self control, I think it best that you check your heart to make sure you are not missing or lacking in all of them. As it is, I don't think it's quite possible to have a basket full of love and kindness and totally be lacking in gentleness and goodness.
But God is all of those things. He is never more of one and less of another. He is 100% all of the fruits 100% of the time. But, if we experienced all of him all of the time, I think we'd be so overwhelmed at the glory of it that our hearts might burst from the inside out.
I have not always been aware of His faithfulness as I have come to be aware of His love and his patience. Learning of His faithfulness is a hard lesson to learn, actually. If you don't already know about it, I suggest you start being thankful for it now, because it takes a storm and a beating to realize it's value, it seems. It did for me anyways. How would I have known of it if I had not seen it. And how would I have seen it if I was not shaken to the very core of my being?
Even still, I can never live in a way that will fully give Him glory or credit for how He has carried me through the fires and dressed my wounds. If I am to think of Him like the Sun and me being like the moon, made to reflect the light of the Sun and give off light where the earth is dark, I can only imagine that I am the sliver-est of crescents on many a cloudy night. But it's funny how that works, isn't it. The moon is always reflecting the Sun 100% of the time. It's just that we don't always see it. And for believers, we are bringing glory to God 100% of the time because he has already made us glorified. We just don't always see it, nor do we always realize it. I think too often we look at the clouds in our life and think that we are worthless and serve no purpose at all. What we don't know is that our lives are more significant than we'll ever know.
But the thing about the moon, is that it stays in its place and does its thing every day whether the clouds are there or not. And we are to be as faithful as that. Always reflecting God's glory and light no matter what kind of storm might be making it difficult to see. He is the example of faithfulness for us and we are to do the same.
And we can be assured that in His faithfulness that He who began a good work in you will carry it out to completion, until the day of Christ Jesus. And sometimes, in the process, He has to break down our walls and our towers and remake a few things just so that he can be close to us and give us life and joy. But, He is faithful. He won't stop until He is finished.
He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
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