closing the gap
I got away this weekend to the desert. Something about the heat, the sweet community I was surrounded by, and the words spoken over me, gave the Lord the perfect means to giving me a new song and reenergizing my spirit. Enough to write for the first time in what feels like forever.
It’s been a sweet season. One of incredible fruit and immense faithfulness. The kind of season marked by joy and life and a certain vibrancy that covers it all. These seasons don’t come about often, and I think when they do, we sometimes miss them in preparation or anticipation of change, in anxiety for the coming winter, even.
But I don’t want to miss this. I want to soak in and sink into being at home. Being in my sunshine state with my sunshine people. Getting all I can from an internship that I adore (more on that to come in later posts), and deepening my well. I am trying to embrace this, soak in every moment and lean into every person, and let each work spoken over and into me sink deep in my soul. Because I know life will soon become papers and deadlines and all-nighters and professors and students and subways once again and all too soon. Sweet in its own right, but much different.
The Lord has been speaking to me about closing the gap. There is a gap sometimes, between what I say I am going to do, and what I actually do. Things like throwing around that catchy phrase “I’m praying for you", and then not actually adding that person to my list when I’m on my knees. Saying I want to get coffee with someone and never making a plan. He is teaching me to close that gap -- that intention without execution is really, truly pointless, and a missed mark altogether. Jesus didn’t just say He’d give Himself as a sacrifice, He actually did. And had He not, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
He loves us with the ultimate follow through and sacrifice of Himself, so why can’t I love with the follow through of the plans I say I’ll make or the prayers I promise I’ll pray? We are to love in deed and truth, not just in word (1 John 3:18). And loving, leadership, ministry, all of it doesn’t come when I’m finally out in the world making big moves — it comes now. In the quiet corners, in the conversations walking through a hallway, in the prayers prayed over someone in my car. If I don’t practice loving well now, it’ll never be full and true later when I am walking even more fully in my calling. What we practice in private is what will come out when it’s game time.
And in that same vein, I need to remember how sweet He is to be building me. While I may think the tasks I have to do sometimes are remedial or tedious, I have begun to realize that He is faithfully shaping me, working me into a rhythm of service, prompting me into a posture of humility sometimes while I do things that seem to have nothing to do with what I eventually want to do.
The reality is, our generation loves to jump the cliff. We want things now, rapidly and overnight. We want instant gratification and overnight success. But He has been reminding me that when we jump a cliff, if we stumble, we fall all the way back down to the bottom. But when we let Him take the time to build the stairs, to make a way, if we stumble, we’ll fall a few steps, but ultimately, the fall wasn’t fatal. But we have to surrender to the building process.
What He can build in and through me is greater than anything I could ever build myself. He is the Master Builder, while I have only played in the sand.
