Knowing God, His character, His ways, His thoughts, and certainly His heart changes us.  That seems almost silly to say to an audience of people who would say they know God.  However, knowing demands depth.  The deeper we go the more we find out.

I'm digging deeper into knowing God.  Part of my "knowing" Him involves dealing with some past hurts that have blinded me from really seeing who He is in my life.  If any of you are familiar with a class called Living Waters, I am a current student.  This 20-week course dives into past hurt and allows God, Healer, to enter into those places.

It's been scary.  It's been like standing on the edge of a cliff and being asked to jump.  Jump hard.  The first jump I took was into a memory that surfaced when I was 7 years old.  It was a memory that I had forced down, kept quiet, formed opinions about God and myself, and protected from ever surfacing - ever.  Yet, the kindness of God allowed me to go knee-deep into the memory.  Actually, go heart-deep.

Like a diver preparing for an underwater excursion, I prepared.  I entered into the pain of the moment.  What surfaced was the most significant and tangible experience with this Creator, God, that I have ever experienced.  Where I had seen Him absent, He was front and center.  Where I had seen Him permissive, He was a warrior - fighting for me.  There are no words.  I am forever changed by allowing the hurt to propel me into a place of intense healing that has changed me.  I am changed because I saw the face of God in the middle of pain.

I have known God for a long time.  When I was 19 years old, I entered into relationship with Him.  This journey has never been dull.  Despite knowing Him and walking in constant ear shot of Him, like any human is conditioned to do, I have tried to avoid pain.  Makes sense.  This idea is often a reliable and encouraged survival technique.  However, when avoiding soul pain its just a denial activity that won't end well.  The Bible says there is a root of bitterness (Hebrews 12:15) that when not dealt with grows.  Bitter roots grow bitter plants.  Bitter plants grow bitter fruit.  Yet, some of us learn to tolerate the taste of the bitter.  Bitter can be pain we avoid but dull with addictions.  Bitter can be memories we repress.  Bitter can be activities that keep our minds too busy on healing our inner world.

In Isaiah 42:25, the Bible says that Jacob (one with a relationship with God) was surrounded by God's anger but didn't know it.  He was even burned by the fire of His anger but paid no attention.  Let that fall on us.  How many of us walk around with our bitter, our pain, our offense and have no idea the long-term affect it is wreaking on us?  We've carried it (bitter, pain and offense) so long we've gotten used to it and don't even think twice about the extra weight we carry.  It's like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water.  If you stick this green jumper into a pot of lukewarm water he feels comfortable.  If you gradually turn up the heat to the point of boiling, Mr. Green Jumper remains and is boiled alive.  He just got used to the water.

Pain - our pain - I believe is meant to drive us to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  Our pain is for our good.  Our good Father is not the giver of pain.  That role belongs to the ruler of this world who battles for our demise every day we breath on the planet. But in His great love for us, He desires for us to use our pain as a catalyst for change.  Our pain is a trigger.  We've learned to see the trigger as negative.  What if we dared to change the semantics and gave it another value?  What if the trigger had value?  What if that pain had value to thrust us first not into fear, addiction or bitterness but into the Presence?

I said that I am learning more about God, His character, His ways, His thoughts, and His heart.  In doing so, I'm proving my own point that knowing these things about my Creator demands depth.  The deeper I go the more I find out.  I'm finding out that I don't need absence from pain, I need a fresh outlook on where pain can take me!  One memory dealt with and healing achieved.  Believe me, there is more to deal with but I'm committed to stay in the fight.  How about you?  Put on gloves that are given to you by a gracious, kind, and victorious Father.  It will cost you pain.  But ... it is worth it.  It's always worth it!

P.S.  Frogs weren't meant to boil!

Secret.  Life often sucks.  This morning I am thinking of several friends, friends of friends, or current news.  Every person who occupies a space in my head has a story of hurt.  The hurt is real enough that it could overtake them.  The ones that I know personally who are hurting make me hurt, too.  Funny how we humans empathize with friends.  This must be how God feels when we hurt.  After all, we are made in the image of the One who whispered life into our bodies.

Secret.  I love order.  Usually, this love of order spills right into my morning routine (the fact that I said routine should be a blatant give-a-way of my love of order).  I usually have a plan of what to read in my Bible.  From that plan, I write insights, prayers, heart moments.  This morning, no plan.  The weight of the hurt from others weighs me down in heavy clothes and mood.  The only plan I have is to seek the One who knows the hurt.

Secret.  I love David.  Often schizophrenic in His approach to God, I can relate.  He bears all, this man after God's own heart.  He rises on heights seemingly too high for mere mortals and then falls so deep the dark overtakes him.  The only consistency in his writing is that he knows - KNOWS - the One to whom he praises or bellows from his belly




Sounds desperate?  Desperate and real.  Yet in these moments of letting emotion mote and feelings feel he follows up with:

"God is my shield."
"God is an honest judge."
"I will thank the Lord who is just."

He knows himself.  He is not his own shield, an honest judge, or just when it comes to his enemies.  In the heat of the moment, we often misplace our pain.  We place it on God, ourselves, others and beg that it be erased, immediately.  But what I see in our friend, David, is that he overturns his natural tendency to spout unreal sentiments in the heat of the moment and surrender his feelings to the authority of God.

Secret.  I love promises.  When someone promises me they will do something, bring me something, offer me something ... I delight.  When God gives me a promise, I hold on for dear life.  I hold on too tightly, afraid, in fact, that the circumstances I find myself in will somehow have the power to undo the promise given and make me hurt all the more.  Can we all just recognize that as a lie?

A promise - in the middle of pain - doesn't always erase the pain or change my circumstances but it gives me HOPE.  The kind of hope that Psalm 37 speaks about ... "trust in the Lord and do good and you will live safely in the land and prosper."  Trust - in the middle of the pain - the promise of God.

Finally, I love that David gives a visual of this because visual learner that I am, I need a picture.  Here's the picture.  A table.  A table in the middle of chaos.  Psalm 23:5 paints a beautiful picture of what holding on to a promise in the middle of pain looks like, "He prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies."  A promise from God is a certificate of authority.  Use it and trust it.  It's your ticket toward resting in the middle of pain and not succumbing to it.

Sitting at a table ...
Christina