I Know You Are, But Who Am I?

One of the many lines from the Pee-Wee Herman Show that I loved was, “I know you are but who am I.”
Have you been experiencing the wonder of your lovely little world like a rug, only it’s who you thought you were, being pulled out from under you? I have!
I love how certain we think we are; I’m not moody, subject to emotional swings, given to depression, I’m stable as they come, yeah, right you are. Most likely you haven’t met up with this lamb that is a lion, yet. Concepts at best might give one a bad case of mental diarrhea, but turning your life upside down, hardly.

It doesn’t take much scraping off of the veneer of so called stability we think we have to realize that any steadiness we have is but the gracious way our loving Father insulates us from grief. He only has to peel back a little in one tiny area of his protection in our lives and we learn right smartly how empty we are in ourselves.

I personally believe that what each of us is facing, going through, has no known man made template available to assist us while we are being extricated from the matrix of religion.
There is an intriguing definition of unbelief based upon Hebrews 3:12, “Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God.” In the sense of that verse, unbelief is “turning away from God.” Conversely then, faith is “staying in the face of God.” When you’re in the furnace of affliction, sometimes the only expression of faith you can muster is that of placing yourself in the face of God.
Many of the Psalms are the chronicles of men who in times of great personal pain cried out-but they cried out in the face of God.

I love how the Father of our spirit hears and sees the cry, longing of our hearts. This morning on my way to breakfast with my friend, brother and boss, Father interjected a thought that turned my day into one filled with a fresh sense of His wonder in and all around me. “Son, you are not free from your circumstances, but you are free to follow me.”
As always, I was being given a wonderful new invitation to receive His embrace in discovering that even my circumstances can’t prevent him from opening up doors that no man can shut.

Rich