Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it

Last week in church we sang the hymn Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing, and I wrote down the title in my phone meaning to write a post on it last Monday.

These words jumped out at me while we sang,

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love.

This is something I’ve talked about before, but it hit me pretty hard while singing.

This is true of me. No matter how many times I’ve come back to God, I still seem to find my way away from Him again.

Little did I know though, that I would experience that very thing over the next week.

I can’t explain what happened.

I wouldn’t even know where to start.

I just entered into some kind of dark tunnel all last week.

I didn’t read my Bible.

I didn’t pray.

I didn’t do much of anything.

Just kind of shut down, and shut people out.

I didn’t want anything to do with even my own family.

Didn’t want to see my wife or my kids.

Didn’t want to leave the house.

Just wanted to curl in a ball and disappear.

The hard thing for me this time, is that I don’t know why.

Most of the time I can point to a situation or event that triggers these episodes.

But this time I really can’t think of anything.

One day I was feeling pretty good and the next I was spiraling downward faster than I have in a while.

All I know is that I woke up Saturday a little before noon and realized that I’d missed half of my son’s birthday and the things that my wife had planned for it.

In fact I woke up to an empty house.

I don’t know why, but this snapped me back to reality.

It’s not like everything went away right away.

I still don’t understand why this happens sometimes.

Maybe I needed a reminder that I can’t do this on my own.

That I’m not a good enough writer on my own to really do anything with.

That I truly need God to help me along the way.

Without Him, I seem to become a blithering idiot really quickly.

He withdrew from there

In Matthew 14, when news reaches Jesus of His cousin John the Baptists death, the first thing He does is very much the first thing I would do. He withdraws from where He was. He hops in a boat and tries to find a place to be alone.

This is exactly the way I am when things get to be too much. I need to be alone to process things. To pray. To collect my thoughts in a quiet and calm place.

But unfortunately for Jesus, in this situation, He is met with all of the people who had heard where He was going.

I think I would have jumped back on the boat and told them to take me somewhere else.

But Jesus had compassion on them.

It’s right after this that two of the most told miracles of Jesus happen. He feeds the 5000 people who have gathered to see Him. Then after finally getting some alone time, He walks on the water to get to the boat with His disciples in it.

I have no idea how Jesus could be that patient and kind. I wish I could be as compassionate and kind when things don’t go the way I have planned. I guess it means I have a long way to go.

A little laughter is good for you

I realized that some of my posts lately have been a little serious.

So, I thought I’d share something that made me laugh during my bible reading today.

The Bible plan I started after Easter had me reading in Ezra today as one of its four tracks.

I’ve found that with the craziness of having a kid run around while I’m trying to read it’s a little hard to concentrate. So I’ve been listening to an audiobook of it while I read it.

Today, while in Ezra 10, it was going through a whole list of names.

I realized that this poor guy had to sit in a room and read off these names one after another.

I couldn’t help but laugh at this image.

The voices in my head

This might be a hard post for me to write and may not even make much sense when I’m done. But I hope that others can get something out of it.

Last week was a really hard week for me. I’m not even really sure why or how it all started. But I can tell you that somewhere in there I started listening to the voices in my head again and, maybe more importantly, believing what they had to say.

For most of my life, I’ve dealt with depression and one of the things that comes along with it for me, is an issue with self-doubt.

I’ve never really believed that I was very good at anything, and no matter how many times other people tell me I am I still find myself falling back into the habits of doubting myself and thinking that I don’t matter.

Most of the time I can handle these voices and put them in their place. I can see that they are just trying to keep me from doing anything with my life.

But last week the voices got really really loud and I had a really hard time blocking them out.

If you asked my wife she could tell you that I probably seemed a little off. I stopped wanting to be around other people and just retracted back into myself.

Looking back on it now, I can see that I was overreacting to everything. Getting mad at the kids for little things. Snapping at my wife for some perceived slight.

These voices told me that nobody really cared what I had to say.

Plus who was I to tell anybody anything about God?

I’m just a sinner. Look at your anger. How can you speak of God’s love with all that anger in you?

I have all of these ideas for things to do. hat I feel are what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. But yet I find myself doing none of them, because this doubt has built up so high inside me that I can’t see over it anymore.

I doubt that God really has any use for me.

I doubt that anyone is even paying attention to me or cares at all.

With all of this going on, I realized on Friday, that I couldn’t remember when the last time I had taken my meds was. So I started taking them again and realized that the voices in my head were just that.

Then I got some words of affirmation this weekend that people were listening and cared about what I was doing.

It was all I could do not to cry.

God heard my doubts and listened and answered them.

He who has ears, let him hear

After Jesus tells the parable of the sower, He says those words.

“He who has ears, let him hear.”

I’ve often thought this a very strange saying.

Wouldn’t most of the people hearing Him speak have ears and in so having ears wouldn’t they have already heard what He said?

But I realized while reading it this time that it doesn’t have anything to do with having real human ears.

It has to do with have spiritual ears and having them open to hear the things that God is trying to say to you.

After Jesus says this, His disciples pull off to the side and ask Him why he speaks in parables and doesn’t just come out and say what He is trying to tell the people.

But Jesus quotes from Isaiah where God is telling Isaiah that the people have closed off their eyes and ears and are no longer able to hear what God is trying to tell them.

I pray that God would open our eyes to see and our ears to hear. That He would help us to understand the things He is trying to tell us and that we might return to Him.

Lord I pray that you would heal us.

Heal us of our unfaithfulness.

Our brokenness.

That You might be glorified in all of the things that we do in your name.

But some were doubtful

After Jesus was resurrected and had spent the 40 days with them, He was preparing to go back to Heaven.

He told the disciples to meet Him on a mountain. The 11 came and met Him there that day.

Matthew 28:17 says,

“When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some were doubtful.”

I love that this is put in there.

They really didn’t need to put it in, and really, some people would probably say that it shouldn’t be there.

Why would these people who have seen all of the miracles that Jesus has performed and lived with Him have doubts?

But I really do love that it’s in there. Because I have doubts.

For a time in my life I thought these doubts meant that I didn’t have enough faith, or that I wasn’t a good Christian.

But I’ve come to see that it is good and natural to doubt things.

It is through my doubts that I have really come to see God in a whole new different and deeper way.

Without my doubts along the way, I wouldn’t be where I am in my faith right now.

Of all the freedoms that God has given me, I think I appreciate the freedom to doubt Him the most.

Not that it should bring us further from Him.

But that through searching for the answers to our doubts, we might find the answers in Him.

Look up

Yesterday in church my pastor was talking about as the women were going towards the tomb they were looking down.

They were grieved over Jesus’ death.

They were scared of what would happen next.

They were worried about how they would roll the huge stone away.

Then they looked up and saw that God had already taken care of it all.

Jesus wasn’t dead.

God had a plan for what came next.

The stone was already rolled away.

We can get so focused on our own problems and pains, that we fail to look up and see that God has already done the hard work for us.

He’s already gone before us and moved the stone away. We just have to look up and see it.

As I was playing in the worship team yesterday after the sermon. Something told me to look up.

I had been so focused on singing the right words and playing the right chords that I was just looking down.

I looked up and right in front of me was my son smiling back up at me.

If I wouldn’t have looked up I would have lost the chance to smile at Max from the stage. He always asks me to smile at him while I’m playing and most of the time I forget. I just get so focused on the music.

Yesterday I looked up and saw the beautiful gifts that God has given me already.

A beautiful family.

A beautiful church.

A beautiful life.

Why would I ever look down again?