|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
|||
| REST STOP #4: Red dragons, broken pottery and finding God I need to be honest. I’m not reflecting on Jeremiah in a vacuum. Not this month. This has been a month of exile for me, a month of hardened clay that God’s been reshaping. At times it has felt like a month of broken pottery scattered on the ground of a city dump. For me, it wasn’t so much a specific sin, although I do sin, or even societal upheaval, although our society is in a mess in many ways. I had a health crisis. And it shook me. I’m young, I eat right, I exercise, I take care of my stress. I do all the right things. This wasn’t supposed to happen to people like me. And yet it was happening. Like Jeremiah and his people—I was facing despair like a woman in labor pains. A friend of mine gave me another analogy—not labor pains or lumpy clay or broken shards—but red dragons. Red dragons who sat in black convertibles in your driveway. That’s what the chaos, the despair, the unknowing looked like to my friend. I could see those red dragons this month and they were sitting on my driveway—waiting for me to come out. The question was, would I? On one hand, I could pretend the red dragons weren’t there. I could keep busy and just not think about it. I could pray in such a way that I was trying to manipulate God into getting me out of this mess. “God, if I pray two hours every day, will you promise to keep me from (fill in the blank)?” I could choose not let myself cry and even entertain the thought that I might get truly sick. I could pretend to everyone, even myself, that everything was okay. Continued... |
|||||||||
| Back |
Page 8 of 9
|
||||||||
