Epiphany

Sometimes the bunny trails are paths you're supposed to explore for a reason.  As I sat and listened during my prayer time last night, it became clear that this was the case from yesterday's blog post.  Remember how I said that my number one spiritual gift (according to various tests and surveys I've taken for ministry purposes over the years) is compassion, "to suffer with"?  And that that characteristic of my heart seems to be MIA when I feel like it ought to be welling up out of me?

Well, be careful what you ask for.  Because when you ask God questions, He answers, one way or another.  He showed me something pretty revolutionary last night.

While I was listening, I started to think about how the plight of the orphan in general makes me feel: heartbroken.  But if I'm honest, it's in a broad, sympathetic kind of way, not in a gut level, close to home kind of way. Then, I started thinking about N in JP's place: two years old, wandering the streets alone and terrified, hungry, and not even comforted when she was taken to a shelter because she would've been surrounded by strangers. I had to stop my well developed imagination before I got in too deep, because it was more than I could take. I just started sobbing. It made me want to scream and never stop screaming. 

And then God gently dropped this into my heart... Yes, attachment takes time, and that's ok, but knowing how He has wired me, how deeply I feel with others I care about when they suffer, I think there's a part of me deep down that is terrified that if I truly start to feel like JP is my own in the way that N is my own, and my own daughter did experience those heart wrenching things, the feelings that will bring will be more than I can bear. I'm afraid it will undo me completely. That kind of grief can be paralyzing, nauseating, and I don't want to feel that pain after the valley I have already walked through the past couple of years. If only that cup could pass from my lips.  But after I had calmed, and was leaning into Him with those heart groanings that no words can express, He showed me the beauty from the ashes: that accepting, embracing, and willingly walking through that grief in my own heart, and eventually with JP as her journey progresses, is how He will bind us together in exactly the way I was talking about yesterday.  

Does that epiphany change the difficulty of the road ahead?  Nope.  Not in the slightest way.  But there is something freeing about naming a fear, and then relinquishing it.  It brings my vision into focus.  It clears some cobwebs out of my mind.  Not my will, but yours be done.

Oh, how bittersweet is love this side of Paradise.  How deep the Father's love for us.  How rich the blessing of seeing Love revealed.  He is completely glorious.