The first book of his that I read was "The North Face of God". It fell across my journey in the depths of grief over the sudden and tragic loss of my nephew on November 3, 2008. It is a great, great book and I highly recommend it. In short, short synopses of the book, he gently reveals to us that though we may feel as if God is cold and unaware of our hurt, pain, or loss, he is actually protecting us from that in which our eyes here on earth, nor our minds, could possible make sense of.
Isaiah 55:8
I grew to at least trying to trust in God's purpose in our loss, from totally thinking that He was crazy and that nothing could ever make sense of this nor would the God that I know allow such a thing. Friends, it goes so much further than what we know. I have no more answers today than I did last week, last month, or last year. I am merely finding my way into peace with what has transpired and thanking God every day for His patience to endure His pursuit of my heart. I am stubborn, strong willed, and can tend to think that my way of thinking is the right way to think... but sadly, I have been proven wrong more times than I would like to admit. (OTHER than the fact that The University of Oklahoma is part of the Promise Land and produces great athletes and great citizens of this great country....BOOMER SOONER!!!) :0)
I urge you, I highly recommend to you, that if you are at a spot in your journey of life and you are wondering where God is pick up a copy of "The North Face of God". I can promise that He is there with you, He is not asking for you to do anything but allow Him into the pain of your heart where He will heal whats broken and fill you with peace...a peace that surpasses all understanding. He is there through Scripture, through church families, and through numerous conferences, magazines, and books. Ken Gire pens some of the most life changing publications I have read ~ and trust me, my bookshelf is full! I hate "obscure" reading right now. I want to read something that leaves an indellable impression in my heart that will inspire me in my daily journey while here on earth. What I "want" to do and what I actually "do" though still needs great attention for I am far, far, far from where I should be.(Romans 7:19-20 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.)
The book that I just recently picked up of his is just as incredible to me. On the heels of "The North Face" I stumbled upon "Life As We Would Want It, Life As We Are Given It" (The Beauty God Brings From Life's Upheavals). For me personally, reading the first of these two books helped greatly extend the healing process and this book feels to me like the next step up. I am FINALLY starting to understand our place in this broken world and when He is given the opportunity & we move aside, what God WILL do. We have to open ourselves to Him for healing. There is no one person on this earth that can fill your heart 100% of the time with 100% satisfaction guarantee. (the only thing I've seen recently with that guarantee was an infomercial for Life Alert "Help I've fallen and I can't get up....anyway, just sayin!.....for my facebook peeps!)
I have just recently started this book, but I feel a strong passion and direction from God to share it...journal things on this blog because I believe that there is at least one person out there who feels so abandoned by something or someone that they need hope...and hope in anything other than God will leave you feeling even more empty. PLEASE, trust me on this!!! I know this much to be fact, not observation!! I would not be here today, literally, if it wasn't for the grace of God and His mercy and endless love.
So, today, Thursday, September 24, 2009, I want to share a part of the Prologue. I say just a "part" but if you know me, I'll probably be writing the entire prologue. I just feel exceptionally moved to help someone. So Lord, as I begin to share the works of this great author, touch the lives of those who read it and God, in ways only you can create, allow this to cross the eyes of someone who is in dire need of knowing You and Your merciful and gracious love.
"For your thoughts are not My thoughts
neither your ways are My ways." Declares the Lord.
I grew to at least trying to trust in God's purpose in our loss, from totally thinking that He was crazy and that nothing could ever make sense of this nor would the God that I know allow such a thing. Friends, it goes so much further than what we know. I have no more answers today than I did last week, last month, or last year. I am merely finding my way into peace with what has transpired and thanking God every day for His patience to endure His pursuit of my heart. I am stubborn, strong willed, and can tend to think that my way of thinking is the right way to think... but sadly, I have been proven wrong more times than I would like to admit. (OTHER than the fact that The University of Oklahoma is part of the Promise Land and produces great athletes and great citizens of this great country....BOOMER SOONER!!!) :0)
I urge you, I highly recommend to you, that if you are at a spot in your journey of life and you are wondering where God is pick up a copy of "The North Face of God". I can promise that He is there with you, He is not asking for you to do anything but allow Him into the pain of your heart where He will heal whats broken and fill you with peace...a peace that surpasses all understanding. He is there through Scripture, through church families, and through numerous conferences, magazines, and books. Ken Gire pens some of the most life changing publications I have read ~ and trust me, my bookshelf is full! I hate "obscure" reading right now. I want to read something that leaves an indellable impression in my heart that will inspire me in my daily journey while here on earth. What I "want" to do and what I actually "do" though still needs great attention for I am far, far, far from where I should be.(Romans 7:19-20 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.)
The book that I just recently picked up of his is just as incredible to me. On the heels of "The North Face" I stumbled upon "Life As We Would Want It, Life As We Are Given It" (The Beauty God Brings From Life's Upheavals). For me personally, reading the first of these two books helped greatly extend the healing process and this book feels to me like the next step up. I am FINALLY starting to understand our place in this broken world and when He is given the opportunity & we move aside, what God WILL do. We have to open ourselves to Him for healing. There is no one person on this earth that can fill your heart 100% of the time with 100% satisfaction guarantee. (the only thing I've seen recently with that guarantee was an infomercial for Life Alert "Help I've fallen and I can't get up....anyway, just sayin!.....for my facebook peeps!)
I have just recently started this book, but I feel a strong passion and direction from God to share it...journal things on this blog because I believe that there is at least one person out there who feels so abandoned by something or someone that they need hope...and hope in anything other than God will leave you feeling even more empty. PLEASE, trust me on this!!! I know this much to be fact, not observation!! I would not be here today, literally, if it wasn't for the grace of God and His mercy and endless love.
So, today, Thursday, September 24, 2009, I want to share a part of the Prologue. I say just a "part" but if you know me, I'll probably be writing the entire prologue. I just feel exceptionally moved to help someone. So Lord, as I begin to share the works of this great author, touch the lives of those who read it and God, in ways only you can create, allow this to cross the eyes of someone who is in dire need of knowing You and Your merciful and gracious love.
Prologue
He has made everything beautiful in its time.
Solomon
Ecclesiastes 3:11
Thou who wouldst see the lovely and the wild
mingled in harmony on Nature's face,
When we draw close to Nature, reaching out to it for clues to our existence, Nature takes our hands and fills them with the fertile loam of our humanity, reminding us that from the earth we were taken and to the earth we will return.
It's humbling to realize for us who have been given dominion over Nature how limited that dominion is. We can light candles, but we can't hold back the night. We can prepare for storms, but we can't prevent them. We can't stop the rains in times of flood or start them in times of drought. We can't shorten winter or lengthen spring.
In Nature we are confronted with the limits of our dominion. Nowhere are those limits so obvious as in the way mountains are formed. When sheer formations of rock are suddenly thrust through the surface of the earth, we are helpless to stop it. Helpless to control either its duration or its devastation.
We are just as helpless when some tragedy devastates us. Like the death of a child. (Lord, help me to continue) Or the diagnosis of cancer. The prodigal who runs away from home. Or the partner who walks away from the marriage. The sudden disability from a wreck. Or the sobering dismissal from work. (Now, I can honestly say that 5 out of the 6 of these life changing situations Mr. Gire described have intersected with my life at some point WITHIN the last 6 years....)
Upheavals come suddenly, unexpectedly, and often catastrophically. Whenever they come, however they come, they forever ALTER THE SETTLED TERRAIN THAT ONCE WAS OUR LIFE. (emphasis mine) Embedded within us are physical, spiritual, and psychological layers that make up our interior landscape. When upheavals come, they alter every layer with varying degrees of destruction that SOMETIMES TAKE A LIFETIME TO UNEARTH. (again, emphasis mine)
Imagine for a minute that YOU are the landscape. The upheaval thrusts itself mercilessly through the very center of who you are. The abrading of granite. The crumbling of limestone. The crashing boulders as they tumble down around you, shattering to pieces. You feel all of that, every grinding moment of it. Your stomach drops, your head spins, and you watch in helpless horror as the innermost parts of your life lie on the surface, exposed to the elements.
The deafening noise is the sound of the upheaval as it forces its way through every stratified layer that lies within you. Your body, mind, emotions, all these layers are displaced. They are folded or pushed upward or thrust over each other. The social layers of your life are shaken. And the spiritual layers that once seemed such bedrock certainties, they're shaken too.
Who of us can survive the shock and aftershocks of such earth-shaking experiences? Who of us has the strength to sift through the emotional rubble of the resulting devastation? Who of us has the courage to face the future where other upheavals may await us?
Meanwhile, where is God in all of this? Didn't He see the upheaval coming? Couldn't He have prevented it? Or at least warned us of it?
Much of the way pressure within the earth thrusts rock formations through its crust to create mountains, the seismic pressure of these unanswered questions create sudden and sometimes terrifying upheavals in our faith.
~Page 7~
To this bare and broken rock, God comes.
There the weathering grace of God begins its work, wearing granite into soil, planting windblown seeds into barren slopes, bringing life out of lifelessness, beauty out of ugliness.
Season after season, the work continues.
In time, God turns the most terrifying of eruptions into the most majestic of mountains, the most tragic of earthquakes into the most idyllic of landscapes.
That is the unrelenting work of heaven, to make everything beautiful in its time.
And then...the book begins. I believe, because I have read in Scriptures, that God is already with us before tragedy strikes, and He is there with us as it unfolds, and I KNOW He is there holding us when everything around us seems to be falling at our feet and the pain is too much to bear.
We are such a culture of quick fixes. (Look at Obama...never mind...I'm not going there...didn't vote for him, but his entire "change" oriented campaign was not portrayed in unraveling at the speed it is, creating with it monumental difficulties for us, the average American family and the children that will reap the harvest, or lack of, in the future...whew...that's for another time) We want so much for God to take the pain away RIGHT NOW. Sometimes He does and other times, HIS will is to walk with us a little longer in our sorrow so that through the valley, as we walk hand in hand with Him, He can become more intimately real in our hearts and lives. "everything is beautiful in its time" The Scriptures never promise us how long the journey will take...they promise us of the grace, mercy and love that God showers endlessly on those who seek Him and allow Him to be their most intense of desires in life.
I recently have gone through a time of great pain or severe reality check as to where we are as a family. Daren lost his job 7 months ago as most of you know and I think I just turned my head from the true and ugly reality of what was unfolding before us. We are a family of 5 who are maintaining our living through less than $1000 a month from unemployment and through the kindness of Daren's mom allowing us to move into her home and share it with us. My parents have helped provide with school for Kory. But more importantly, there are our prayer warriors that cover and love us....they are a picture of the feathers on the wings of God that we find shelter in.
I don't have any idea what tomorrow holds and I can't change a thing about what happened yesterday, but I can stop TODAY to remind myself that this life is not to be lived the way I want it to be, but as God has carefully orchestrated with every second of my life in mind. I choose to believe that He is with us and has been with us over the past three years as we have been thrust into seasons that without Him, we would have never survived to tell. He has carried us....even when we doubted where He was...He held us even more tightly in the palm of His hand and it is in looking back at those times I truly and honestly can say that I do only see One set of Footprints...
In His Grip and So Thankful for His Love~
Ascend our rocky mountains.
William Cullen Bryant
From His Poem
"Monument Mountain"
~Page 3~
When we draw close to Nature, reaching out to it for clues to our existence, Nature takes our hands and fills them with the fertile loam of our humanity, reminding us that from the earth we were taken and to the earth we will return.
It's humbling to realize for us who have been given dominion over Nature how limited that dominion is. We can light candles, but we can't hold back the night. We can prepare for storms, but we can't prevent them. We can't stop the rains in times of flood or start them in times of drought. We can't shorten winter or lengthen spring.
~Page 4~
In Nature we are confronted with the limits of our dominion. Nowhere are those limits so obvious as in the way mountains are formed. When sheer formations of rock are suddenly thrust through the surface of the earth, we are helpless to stop it. Helpless to control either its duration or its devastation.
We are just as helpless when some tragedy devastates us. Like the death of a child. (Lord, help me to continue) Or the diagnosis of cancer. The prodigal who runs away from home. Or the partner who walks away from the marriage. The sudden disability from a wreck. Or the sobering dismissal from work. (Now, I can honestly say that 5 out of the 6 of these life changing situations Mr. Gire described have intersected with my life at some point WITHIN the last 6 years....)
Upheavals come suddenly, unexpectedly, and often catastrophically. Whenever they come, however they come, they forever ALTER THE SETTLED TERRAIN THAT ONCE WAS OUR LIFE. (emphasis mine) Embedded within us are physical, spiritual, and psychological layers that make up our interior landscape. When upheavals come, they alter every layer with varying degrees of destruction that SOMETIMES TAKE A LIFETIME TO UNEARTH. (again, emphasis mine)
~page 5~
Imagine for a minute that YOU are the landscape. The upheaval thrusts itself mercilessly through the very center of who you are. The abrading of granite. The crumbling of limestone. The crashing boulders as they tumble down around you, shattering to pieces. You feel all of that, every grinding moment of it. Your stomach drops, your head spins, and you watch in helpless horror as the innermost parts of your life lie on the surface, exposed to the elements.
The deafening noise is the sound of the upheaval as it forces its way through every stratified layer that lies within you. Your body, mind, emotions, all these layers are displaced. They are folded or pushed upward or thrust over each other. The social layers of your life are shaken. And the spiritual layers that once seemed such bedrock certainties, they're shaken too.
~Page 6~
Who of us can survive the shock and aftershocks of such earth-shaking experiences? Who of us has the strength to sift through the emotional rubble of the resulting devastation? Who of us has the courage to face the future where other upheavals may await us?
Meanwhile, where is God in all of this? Didn't He see the upheaval coming? Couldn't He have prevented it? Or at least warned us of it?
Much of the way pressure within the earth thrusts rock formations through its crust to create mountains, the seismic pressure of these unanswered questions create sudden and sometimes terrifying upheavals in our faith.
~Page 7~
To this bare and broken rock, God comes.
There the weathering grace of God begins its work, wearing granite into soil, planting windblown seeds into barren slopes, bringing life out of lifelessness, beauty out of ugliness.
Season after season, the work continues.
In time, God turns the most terrifying of eruptions into the most majestic of mountains, the most tragic of earthquakes into the most idyllic of landscapes.
That is the unrelenting work of heaven, to make everything beautiful in its time.
And then...the book begins. I believe, because I have read in Scriptures, that God is already with us before tragedy strikes, and He is there with us as it unfolds, and I KNOW He is there holding us when everything around us seems to be falling at our feet and the pain is too much to bear.
We are such a culture of quick fixes. (Look at Obama...never mind...I'm not going there...didn't vote for him, but his entire "change" oriented campaign was not portrayed in unraveling at the speed it is, creating with it monumental difficulties for us, the average American family and the children that will reap the harvest, or lack of, in the future...whew...that's for another time) We want so much for God to take the pain away RIGHT NOW. Sometimes He does and other times, HIS will is to walk with us a little longer in our sorrow so that through the valley, as we walk hand in hand with Him, He can become more intimately real in our hearts and lives. "everything is beautiful in its time" The Scriptures never promise us how long the journey will take...they promise us of the grace, mercy and love that God showers endlessly on those who seek Him and allow Him to be their most intense of desires in life.
I recently have gone through a time of great pain or severe reality check as to where we are as a family. Daren lost his job 7 months ago as most of you know and I think I just turned my head from the true and ugly reality of what was unfolding before us. We are a family of 5 who are maintaining our living through less than $1000 a month from unemployment and through the kindness of Daren's mom allowing us to move into her home and share it with us. My parents have helped provide with school for Kory. But more importantly, there are our prayer warriors that cover and love us....they are a picture of the feathers on the wings of God that we find shelter in.
I don't have any idea what tomorrow holds and I can't change a thing about what happened yesterday, but I can stop TODAY to remind myself that this life is not to be lived the way I want it to be, but as God has carefully orchestrated with every second of my life in mind. I choose to believe that He is with us and has been with us over the past three years as we have been thrust into seasons that without Him, we would have never survived to tell. He has carried us....even when we doubted where He was...He held us even more tightly in the palm of His hand and it is in looking back at those times I truly and honestly can say that I do only see One set of Footprints...
In His Grip and So Thankful for His Love~
Metamusic: Sleeping Through The Rain - Matthew Sigmon, Julie Anderson
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2 comments:
Wow,Kristi,God certainly seems to be stirring in your life.I wrote down,"The NOrth Face of God"and am interested in reading it.Surely God is pleased by the way you are seeking Him.I admire your courage and your honesty.
Lill Cunningham
Welcome back Kristi. Love you
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