September 10, 2005

  • Sunday, 11 September 2005


    10.10 a.m. NZ time


     


    SURRENDER TO LIFE


     


    I, myself, have only just in the last few weeks discovered that every hard and difficult experience, every painful, crushing adversity that has ever come my way, was a perfectly choreographed, tailor made moment. Each and every experience has been specifically designed to touch and reveal some area within me that needs to be released, so that I might grow into whatever it is that God has in mind for me to become. I find that when I am awake to what’s going on in and around me, and accept each situation as a gift from God, allowing His Holy Being to work it out through me, He is glorified, and I experience the miracle of His presence within me and around me.


     


    It seems to Mari and me, that whatever God provides for us to experience in this present moment, is the very nutrient our spirit needs to grow and be transformed into the image of Jesus. Reality itself is God’s soul food. Each living moment is another word in God’s language, speaking to us, directing our lives, writing His story through us, from one moment to the next. And as we stand poised and awake, ready to do whatever the present moment requires of us, we are at rest in Him, knowing all the while, it’s actually His Holy Spirit moving through us that does, or doesn’t do, what needs to be done or not done. It’s God within us that endures what needs to be endured.


     


    As we surrender our minds and bodies to Him, life becomes a free ride for us. We can sit in the Holy of Holies, one with the Father, one with the Son and one with the Holy Spirit. We can listen and watch them respond with their words and their actions to whatever the situation is that rises up around us.


     


    History is His story; we are just the writing instruments through which the ink of the Holy Spirit flows on to the parchment of time. If we are poised and awake to each moment, His story is written. If we are lost in our thoughts, fearing what might happen tomorrow, or regretting what we consider to be the missed opportunities of yesterday, our part in His story is not being recorded, and we end up with a life full of blank pages, because we weren’t awake to the drama of life as it was being played out all around us. We were lost in our thoughts and not awake to reality.


     


    I can remember the sarcastic laughter of people’s response to the words “Jesus saves” as they would reply “I didn’t know I was lost, yuck, yuck, yuck”. Well if we “knew” we were lost, we wouldn’t be lost would we. I mean do we know we’re asleep when we’re sleeping. I don’t think so. It’s not until we “wake up” that we “know” we were sleeping.


     


    We all know how impossible it would be to cram an entire cow into our mouth and swallow it in one gulp. So what do we do? We cut the cow up into bits small enough to cook and then serve it up on a plate. But you can’t stick a whole T-bone steak in your mouth either, so what do we do? We take our knife and fork and slice off a tiny bite sized piece that we can comfortably chew on. And that my friends, is exactly what this present moment is, a bite sized piece of His story. There’s no way our little pea brains could handle the entire history of mankind in one gulp.


     


    My wife says our lives are like a dot to dot panting and we don’t know what or where the next dot will be. Each dot is a moment, an experience, a word He is writing through our lives, and we don’t know how, what or where that next word is going to express itself. How exciting is that!


     


    To me reality has become the living words of God. So my friends let us wake up. Let us press into these living words of His story and not miss a single letter of this miraculous ride.


     


    Lately Mari and I have been talking about how most of us try so desperately to control our lives and our life situations.  But we have discovered over the years, since Jesus is our life, trying to control our life is like trying to control Him.  When we surrender to life and instead of trying to control it, allow it to control us, we are actually surrendering to Christ in us and around us and allowing Him to control and direct us.  So many people have asked us, “what is God’s will for my life?”  We have found for us, that God’s will for our lives is what IS.  We call the “isness” of life, the business of God. 


     


    Last week a friend of mine told me that at the end of the story everything will be all right, so if things aren’t all right; it’s not yet the end of His story.


     


    So let’s all of us wake up and smell the roses. 


     


    BMcG