The Joy in Not Getting What We Want

Sometimes He calms the storm.  
Sometimes He lets the storm to rage, 
And calms His child.
~ Leslie Gould

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.
~ from Ezekiel 36

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put My law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
~ from Jeremiah 31

Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in Him, and He will act.  He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday.
~ from Psalm 37

Oh beloved, it is true.  We are exceedingly willing to make our own desires the center target of our existence.  Our flesh screams, and our soul listens.  The pains and happy events of life combine with the distress and eustress – and they all conspire to take our eyes off the only One able to actually meet those desires.

And the better part of us, now growing, knows that we really don’t want what that old man is screaming for.  However, the part of us now dead, sometimes screams and rants and raves at the lack of attention.  And some days, it screams louder than we can ignore.

“Help me Jesus.”

And He does, but sometimes not in ways that we expect.  We mostly expect the soft touch of the Carpenter to wipe away the tears from our eyes and give us the awareness of His continuous presence that gives us the joy/strength we know we need.  For apart from His continuous flow of goodness towards us, we are utterly incapable of moving through life with any sort of success.  This He often does, to our great joy!

Even so, He sometimes does the best thing for us and allows the hot pain of a moment to burn against the ever-smoothing edges of our ever-softening heart.  We are almost tempted to cry out, “Oh my G_d, my G_d, why have you turned your back on me?”  Oh, we know that He has not.  But the flash of the pain distracts our view from the beautiful Eyes we generally gaze on most of the time.

And so again, we think (with our soulical intellect) that comfort is the best medicine, but the One now in charge of our Lives definitely knows better.  He knows that there are still connections between soul and spirit that have not yet been severed by the living and active Word at work within us.   So, as He goes to work – now deep within us – we find that the connections are exceedingly sensitive.  They are literally at the seat of our personhood. The last vestiges of living like the old man are being cut away.

It hurts.

He knows.

He keeps cutting.

And this is some of the best news we have ever heard.

Can we see it?  As true believers, we no longer have a life of our own.  We no longer get to decide what is good for us.  We no longer need to get what we want to be happy (actually, that never worked anyway).  Because the new heart that He gives us in not an improvement on the old one.  The new heart is not Designed to take its cues from the flesh and the from the intellect.  So, as the old ways of the old body and mind try to take over, His Spirit will hack them mercifully away.  And this is often the pain we feel – the suffering – that Paul and others speak of in the New Testament.

For, the new heart He puts within us is Designed to be totally connected to Him.  Then – and only then – it is designed to feed wisdom and information to the mind and body that they might work in concert with our new Life now being lived in Him.  The flesh and intellect no longer get to call the shots in our lives and drive our spiritual life.  And even though they absolutely scream sometimes, the lie of self-comfort is not validated by the loudness of their complaint.

Are you hurting beloved?  Don’t seek comfort.  He will surely bring it in due time.  However, in the mean time, He may allow the hurt to burn away the remaining dross and connections to our old life.  Yes it hurts.  Yes it is worth it.

Let Him beloved.

All is well.