God taught me long ago that there are many aspects and pieces and secrets to his identity and his heart. Over the last several years he has been teaching me how to seek out and discover these pieces to his heart. I've found him in the children I work with, in the clarity of a blue sky and a crisp breeze; I've found him in art, seeing his tender heart. I've found him in the ministry I serve, Compassion International, and discovered the fierce father heart of protection and desperate love he has for his children in his faithful provision for their needs and heart.
I've also found him in music. Music has played a major role in my life for a long time now. As a writer, I am not always successful in expressing myself outside the realms of paper and pen. I need time to think and muse and chew things over before I am comfortable giving an opinion on it or claiming an idea or feeling. Otherwise it ends disastrously. Music, I've come to find, touches a place in my heart and soul that often needs to be expressed yet I have no words to do justice to the sensation. Either love, anger, frustration, sadness, brokenness, adoration...I've found solace in coming to God through music to express my heart to him when I don't even know what I am feeling exactly, it helps guide me to communication. God laid it on my heart about a year ago that music is used for worship because of this very reason. It expresses a piece of his heart and being that is indescribable and that can't be put to words...it can only be put to sound and feeling.
Its the tender feeling of being at his feet and knowing that he is filling the room around you to the point the hair on the back of your neck and arms stands on end and you hold your breath for fear that you're dreaming and if you breathe or blink the experience will fade and you'll never experience it again. The beauty of the feeling, however, is that he is actually interacting with you and for all you're feeling, he's feeling more and it becomes a sort of waltz where you're hand in hand and left in awe of what is going on.
Worship has become a daily moment by moment practice for me as I seek out a knew aspect of Christ's heart and try to find him in new and unusual or simply overlooked or unexpected places. This feeling of wonder isn't easy to keep, it comes and goes, rises and fades as the passions of love slip through your fingers over time. It takes choosing to keep it and it is a ferocious battle to nurture it and keep the desire to go after it. Over the last few weeks I've found it so easy to sink into discouragement and doubts when I know without a doubt what God has told me and shown me and promised me. I know what he is asking me to do in the here and now and that is more than most can say. The future doesn't matter (a very difficult thing for me to admit if you know me at all) so long as I know he is with me now and I am in his will. I trust him to take care of my future and what is going on in my life now. I trust him to take care of the things it will take to get me from now to next year, or even tomorrow morning or the next hour.
Believe it or not, my plans are not made for me. I've been planning them for years and nothing about them are for myself. I promised God I would dedicate at least six months of my life if not a year. I want to have that time where I can separate myself from...well, myself, and be challenged, stretched and molded as I come to a new place and level of my relationship with him. I want to know him more and be more like him. I am not my own, I was bought with a price and I am content to be his own. Some may think this sounds brainwashed but when you experience God and see his hand in your life...He becomes the reality that we thought we always had such a grasp on before. It baffles me to imagine life without him. For all you geeks out there, its almost like a Jedi thing. I dunno how to elaborate on that right now, but maybe you'll catch it. I want to glorify him with my life and I want to trust him with a reckless abandon that I can't explain and that I'm not ashamed of. I don't want to hold back anymore. I don't want to forget all he has done for me and all he has brought me through, carried me through. I truly am in love with my Savior and I have yet to regret the relationship. He gives me a hope that I so often lack when doing things on my own. He gives me life, rather than survival. He makes me alive.
There is a song with one line in the chorus that I have simply fallen in love with. The line reads: "Tell me again, how we fit into his plan, how he makes our failure his glory. Tell me again, lest I forget who I am. I need to remember the story. Remind me, lest I forget." That song, that one line, has become my prayer these past few months because I do. I forget. I don't know how, I can't explain it, but I do and it breaks my heart.
Keep me in your prayers, if you read this. My heart is to love as my Savior loves. To love him, to love those he puts before me...to love those he has brought into my life...whether I'm loved in return or not. I just want to love as he does. I can't do that if I forget the One who is that love.
~Megan
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