The Stirring

If you came to see news not pertaining to my recent soul-desert journey, you can scroll down one post and find some random news. But if you're here to read the next part of the journey, pull up a chair! I'm just about to start!

In the week that followed Valentine's Day, I did not hear a peep from Mr. Mysterious. But even though that area of life was seemingly dormant, my prayer life was stirring. God packed so much into that one week, and I didn't even see it for what it was.

This is the thing I love about journaling my prayers. I write what I sense in front of my soul, even if I don't understand it at the time. I love being able to read back over them later and with that perspective of distance...I can begin to piece together how God was working the whole time.

Though I'd left the outcome of the love pursuit in the Lord's hands, I did offer up one more prayer concerning it early that week: I feel I need to ask You. Show me. And please, God, if this is NOT what You want for me, protect me from it. Don’t even let him pursue me.

That particular week was also the beginning of the Lenten season. Some of you may remember that my "fast" this year was unusual at best. I had absolutely no intentions of even participating, actually . Lent, for me, had become somewhat of a God-induced diet. Some years I’d given up desserts…full meals…snacks…always with the hope of a slimmer waist for the debut of the Easter dress. I was fairly certain this was not the purpose of Lent, so I declared it better to not participate than to participate with impure, non-spiritual motives.

But that night, as I hopped in the car to drive to the midweek service at church, I found that after less than a dozen blocks, I was disinterested in the music that blared from my CD. I’m typically hard-core about driving with music cranked to ridiculous decibels, so that surprised me. And it was that night I heard the first whisper from the Lord.

Give up music for Lent. I literally turned off the music as if to somehow hear Him better. There it was again. Give up music for Lent. Spend this driving time with Me instead. I flipped the CD back on and set the music to the start of the Hallelujah Chorus. Then I pushed the power off and thought ahead to forty silent days. The Hallelujah Chorus would be in order to celebrate the endurance of that.

I truly had no idea that those forty days of silent drive time were, in fact, boot camp for hearing the Voice of the Lord.

The same night, I crawled into bed and turned to the day's reading in Streams in the Desert. It quoted A. B. Simpson: “As faith continues to speak, God continues to give. He meets you today in the present and tests your faith. As long as you are waiting, hoping, or looking, you are not believing. You may have hope or an earnest desire, but that is not faith.” And after I read that, I wrote these words...not quite understanding what I was asking, yet somehow sensing something about it could be pivotal: Lord, I know my faith is not what it could be. Truth be told, I’m a bit scared to ask for help with it. What might it mean?

And Saturday night, a full week after the email arrived in my inbox, I wrote these words in the prayer journal: Please help me to delight in You.

The prayer book talks about the pray-ers of the Bible and says, “They established an identity for themselves – an identity God wanted them to establish.” Yes. Show me what You desire me to establish. (This came from the Disciple's Prayer Life workbook that we were using in our Sunday School class at the time.)

Streams has such appropriate words for the path… “It is possible for believers who are completely willing to trust the power of the Lord for their safekeeping and victory to lead a life of readily taking His promises exactly as they are and finding them to be true...It is possible to have our thoughts and the desires of our hearts purified in the deepest sense of the word…We will never be satisfied with anything less…” (H.C.G.Moule) Oh God. Please manifest this in me.

I can tell you right now, six months on the other side of that week, that each piece of it was completely directed by the hand of God Himself. He led me to pray that tiny prayer about pursuit or prevention of it. I would return to that prayer over and over in the weeks to come. He led me to consider the unorthodox choice of forty days of silent driving. He led me to pray earnestly about how to develop faith,identity, and a purified heart - and even the request to have all these things manifested in my heart.. And He was about to go to work answering all of it.