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.