The Undoing

​The act of journaling draws a line for my soul. The blank pages always present a sobering choice. With each word I confront the choice to either write of the reality inside my heart and mind, or betray my very own conscience and stray from the truth. I have discovered my pen becomes the weapon and the page the battleground against self-deception. I never can bring myself to actually script what I know is a lie. That is where my pen stops.

Writing, before God and God alone, has proved for me to be one of the most effective disciplines against self-deceit...one of our most formidable foes.

I have experienced firsthand the devastation that occurs when one person is totally taken in and full-scale self-deception takes over a life. My family deals with the consequences of that every single day. Even when I look back on my own life I see periods that were darkened by the slowly suffocating and disorienting fog of deceit. I underestimated its danger. I know it was grace alone that pulled me from that darkness and did not let it overtake my soul and entirely blind me.

And even though I am brought to deepest praise when I remember how God has repeatedly rescued me from that place, I still find myself susceptible. There it is, self-deceit, trickling in like slow drips into tiny cracks I often do not even notice... until I write. The war wages on.

This week I was unsettled, overwhelmed, even rattled. I knew truth of the Word in my head but my heart was lagging, stuck in that confusion, searching for direction in that messy, foggy, dim place. As much as I wanted to finally land, to rest anchored, to finally feel that inexplicable peace... I knew all the convincing was ultimately fruitless, I simply was not there yet. I was unable to pick up my pen and face the mess inside.

Yet once again, God rescued me. Perhaps part of the problem is we view “rescue” as too dramatic of a description, reserved for only special and extra challenging times in our lives. But “rescue” implies helplessness and a need for deliverance that we can never orchestrate. And that’s exactly what I find God consistently doing over and over again for me.

This past week I could not escape that underlying tension. I continued to return and remind myself of truth through the written Word and prayer, but my heart remained stubbornly restless. That disconnect was frustrating and deeply unsettling. But I have learned the strength of an emotion does not always equate to its trustworthiness. Even our emotions can be used to blind, tangle, and even ensnare us.

The undoing.

That is the phrase that ran through my mind as I climbed into a hot bath after verbalizing to my husband my weakness and inability to get my own heart to take hold of the truth I knew I believed. I had surrendered and exposed my inability to overcome that deep divide.

The undoing.

Maybe God knows that His first step in creating something new in my heart is always first undoing the mess I have created.

The undoing.

As I sat and read “Awe” by Paul David Tripp, God finally shifted the hard plates of my heart. The Scripture I had been reading that week pierced through the words on the pages and directly into my surrendered heart. It was a remarkably clear and personal message.

It felt like the places where pressure had just been overwhelming me suddenly shifted and settled into that familiar bedrock of inexplicable and undeniable peace. All the twisted and tightened knots were limp strands smoothly loosening.

The undoing.

He knew I would get all the way to the point where I was saying my fears out loud, all the way to the point where I was literally expressing my need for help...

And He knew He would meet me immediately after that moment...

Maybe that is part of how God works with us. Maybe He sometimes allows us to continue wrestling and fighting, to continue getting all tangled up, so that He can provide the first grace, exposing the truth: we ARE in a desperate state, that our convincing IS futile, that we can NEVER bridge the disconnect...we need to be untangled; we need to be undone.

Because then He can lavish detailed, timely, personal grace. He can enter the present mess I am in and gently begin His undoing.

What kind of God would choose to work in a way where He wants to first enter the mess?

A remarkably personal one. An undeniably loving one. One that does not want us to miss He has entered the mess from the beginning of time.

This past Good Friday, the day where I sometimes struggle to sit and actually imagine the horror of what happened to Jesus as He was brutalized and entirely forsaken by God... the familiarity with the story can sanitize it, numb my ability to actually meditate on what He went through on that day.

But the more I do not run from the reality of it, the more I understand the darkness and suffering and the literal hell He endured, the more I allow myself to take it in... the more I am brought to my knees at the rest of the story.

The undoing.

All my sin and sickness of soul... undone.

All my helplessness...undone.

All the levels of my deepest fears and conflicting emotions... undone.

And when I finally grasp the magnitude of what that means...

That I am entirely saved,

I am entirely free,

My messes can and will be completely redeemed...

My heart is undone.

#growing #grace #prayer #writing