An excerpt from 'One Thousand Gifts : A Dare to Live Life Fully Right where You Are" :
Every dark woods has words. And every moment is a message from The Word-God who can't stop writing His heart.
But who can read His messages?
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To read His message in moments, I'll need to read His passion on the page; wear the lens of the Word, to read His writing in the world. Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world, because The Word has nail-scarred hands that cup our face close, wipe away the tears running down, has eyes to look deep into our brimming ache, and whisper, "I know. I know." The passion on the page is a Person, and the lens I wear of the Word is not abstract idea but the eyes of the God-Man who came and knows the pain.
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"See now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal" (Deuteronomy 32:39). I nod. I know. I know. And these truth words reconfigure the battlefield under my feet.
I know all our days are struggle and warfare and that the spirit-to-spirit combat I endlessly wage with Satan is this ferocious thrash for joy. He sneers at all the things that seem to have gone hideously mad in this sin-drunk world, and I gasp to say that God is good. The liar defiantly scrawls his graffiti across God's glory, and I heave to enjoy God.. and Satan strangles, and I whiten knuckles to grasp real Truth and fix that beast to the floor.
It's just that the eyes are bad - my perspective. "Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body," Jesus said. "When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!" (Matthew 6:22-23). If Satan can keep my eyes from the Word, my eyesight is too poor to read light - to fill with light. Bad eyes fill with darkness so heavy the soul aches because empty is never truly empty; empty is only a fully, deepening darkness. So this is what is to be. Eve in the Garden, Satan's hiss tickling the ear, "Did God actually say ... ?" (Genesis 3:1).
No Scripture glasses to read what God is trying to write through a prodigal child? Scrawl my own quick editing on the half-finished story : failure. Satan's tongue darts.
Not wearing a biblical lens to decipher the meaning of a doctor's ominous diagnosis? Just read Satan's slippery interpretation : cheated.
Not using anything to bend the light of this world so I can read my own messy days? Spray on another layer of graffiti : worthless.
So I have been ambushed.
Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps.
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I listen and I live fully on what comes straight from His mouth. That serpent, he's slithered with the lie that God doesn't give good but gives rocks in the mouth, leaves us to starve empty in wilderness and we'll just have to take the stones of the careless God and make them into bread to feed our own hungry souls. And I hear it.. the Son of God saying there is only one way to live full and it is "by every word that comes from the mouth of God."
It is all that Jesus used to survive in the desert, in His wrangle with silver-tongued Lucifer, only this : "It is written." And it's the Word of God that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue. That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, that makes the eyes see, the body full of light.
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I wear my lenses and I pray to see.
Ann Voskamp.
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