You sit down to pray with your Bible in your lap, & within ten seconds your mind is somewhere else, unable to focus on the task at hand. I find myself having to stop & pray for clarity & focus quite a bit...
Especially today when I woke up with my mind racing. Sometimes I still surprise myself with how much I worry with & analyze, but the last week has presented a few incomprehensible situations, leaving me with a lot of questions, fear, and cloudy moments.
So, this morning when I sat down to read scripture & I couldn't focus long enough to make it to the third word, I immediately put my Bible aside in order to attack the spiritual warfare at its core & to ask for sanity & clarity. No sooner did those words come out of my mouth did the song "Mystery" by Charlie Hall come through my headphones:
Sweet Jesus Christ, my sanity
Sweet Jesus Christ, my clarity
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
That's when I realized that the three truths of Christ's death, resurrection, & coming redemption of a broken world are the only clarity & refuge I need.
It's not that I had never realized this before, but today He needed me to see how I was trying to make sense of things & answer tough questions on my own, when in actuality all I need to do is rest on these truths. No questions asked.
We serve a God who is the same yesterday, today, tomorrow, forever. Even when our fear is crippling, our faith is weak, our hope is waning, & our strength is gone, we have a God with an unfathomable capacity to see past our sin, our hopelessness, our depravity, & pick us up, covered by the blood of a risen & perfect Savior & love us perfectly through it.
I also found myself bringing before the Lord lots of phrases that started with "I'm scared of..." or "I'm scared for...". Coming from a girl who isn't scared of much in this world, these were hard to admit. But Christ never fails to meet us where we are.
He knows my inability to admit my fears & insecurities better than I do myself. It was like He shook me & said, "Look, you know that unfathomable, perfect love that I possess & pointed out to you minutes ago? Yeah, it covers those fears, too, Katie. I never tire of hearing your heart, but know you have no reason to worry..."
Hallelujah to the King!
He has brought me so far. He has helped me make sense of this wrecked heart of mine & replaced it with hope & healing, & I pray for the strength to take these truths into areas of my life that are hard. I believe them too much & rest in them too much to let them be in vain.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow. His ways are oh so good.
