Untangle Me

        It makes me angry when I know I have been stolen from. Even more so when I find that I was complicit in this theft. Going into deeper places with God often means pain. The plow takes you at times into old and strangely familiar territory that you wish you could just forget. You get to find treasures you didn't see before as well. The roots of your faith and your strength. Its really cool to get to trace back to the tree the rich inheritance I am grafted into. It is also quite painful to excavate the roots of sin that has been in your life for some time. For me recently I have been seeing not just how these ways of death have started, but also the fruit they bear out to present day, the entanglement they have in my thinking, and how I left a place for them to grow. I don't want to be stolen from any more. In the words of a friend: "go there God".

        God's victory is securely won! This is truth. In love, He is in the process of untangling us and dealing with us ever so patiently, in order to bring all things into alignment with this victory. But I don't like to see these things about me. I don't like to see this beautiful creation, I know so personally as me, so blurred, tangeled, and muddled. And I don't enjoy Him seeing it either. This might shed some light on some lie I believe about God still. The fact that there is a questionining in my heart about whether He would reject me if He saw this.
    
        The truth is He can see this entanglement that has skewed my ways and poisoned me in some ways, but He still looks on me and smiles. Oh God, let my heart lean into truth. I like being me now more than I ever have, but I don't always enjoy every aspect of the process of maturing. I do have this great hope: the very fact that He is allowing me to see this now shows me his desire to thoroughly untangle. God is already "going there", the question is: will I go there with Him? I can't face it on my own. If He is going there... did I not pray that I want to be with Him where He is?

"You are so kind,

and so gentle

the way that you untangle me..." 

                                                                                                -AE

        I want His victory to bear out in my life. I can't just avoid this stuff any more. He showed me a picture in the middle of the night of myself. I was like a driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel in a turning lane in the area of my heart he was addressing. Its time to surrender and let Him do the surgery. I could choose to avoid Him and the pain, but that would be the most painful and destructive way. He is after more life, more joy, and more fruit. Am I after those things too? I know now too well that I must let him operate on my heart to remove these deeply sunk roots. They have stolen from me and poisoned me too long. They are not from God, the one who created me. They are not a part of me. God help me to stop clinging to the things of death that cling to me. Help me to learn to cling to you in these areas of my life. Thank you for taking me on this journey. For showing me things my eyes would not otherwise see.

Roots

          Several years ago as I was on a misadventure God told me I was going to be a lot closer to Him at the end of this journey. Now at that point I thought He meant just that trip. However, that trip didn't start out well, and ended prematurely with no gas and little money in the middle of a canyon. It turned into a real crisis. The end of this journey He was referring to was not the end of this running away from my life. He brought me back, and I am so thankful that He did.

         This journey is about closeness, but that doesn't mean there will be no wilderness and no battles. Actually what we consider to be pressures and pains and crisis are what cause our heart to either spin out or cling to the one we love. The whole question then is where are we anchored. In the natural I have found a home. In May of last year I moved into my first apartment with zero roomies. It was the first time I had my own space in quite some time. I had a rhodedendron plant that was in a pot. I had purchased it from a nursery and I was carrying it around from 1 residence to the next. I had been told that it would last 3 years in the pot and then it would die if it weren't put in the ground. Six months after I moved into that apartment, it was time for that rhodi to be planted. And God also started to speak to me about putting down roots. I planted that rhodi in the little garden I had in front of my place as well as some other plants.

         Before that I felt like I had no clear place of belonging, but in my heart that brought some firmness to the connections I have with the people around me. For a while all I wanted to do was get out of here, and I almost broke off all relationships. So much blessing that God didn't let me succeed, that would have been so ruinous. If I can't put down roots and deal with whatever deficiencies I may be experiencing I will start smaller somewhere else and encounter other problems that I have no grace for. I will also run right back into me. I have to deal with this at some point, there is no escaping me.

         This closeness that God has been drawing me into and growing me into, I have had previews of it, but now He is growing me into it. And in it He is creating a solidness that has never been part of my being until now. And it comes from the washing of the word, and the eating and drinking of the word and leaning and following the Holy Spirit. Jesus voiced a desire of His heart the night before the cross. They had dinner, Jesus had washed their feet, and had been telling them to love one another the same way that he had just loved them. Judas had disappeared to who knows where, and they went out into the night; in the cool and misty night. You know, crickets chirping back over some hill. They went and they were crossing the Kidron Valley David crossed when fleeing from Jerusalem as his son attempted to stage a coup. There were vineyards and they came to the Mount of Olives. The whole watch and pray scene happened here. And he had been explaining to them abide in me. But at some point during this night so different from the others, Jesus prayed in front of them out loud for the sake of His disciples.(John 17)  He was sharing with them His heart that night more than any other night. This desire that Jesus shared was this, "Father, I want those whom You have given Me to be with Me where I am." At the front of the book of John, the first chapter and second verse it says, "He was with God in the beginning" You can see it through the whole book the relationship Jesus had with the Father is on display. He was showing us how to be with Him. And that is what I want more than ever to be with Him. Jesus, I want to be with you where you are. There is so much in that, ask me about the "with God" thing some time, I'll tell you. Besides natural roots in Salem, I have put down roots in the Spirit. I get to abide in the vine (John 15), I get to be that Psalm 1 tree planted by the waters, and it is about closeness and staying there.