May
28, 2015
I
realized that Jesus really does intend for my faith
to grow without sight- that His purpose for me is to
cling to Him and delight in Him and adore Him with the poorest of spiritual
sight and thereby to grow my faith in His faithfulness.
“I
can delight myself in You even without sight,” I said to Jesus, giving voice to
this line of thought.
It is very beautiful, Jesus replied. He showed me how much that moved Him- that even with sight out of focus, half
blind, I gave myself over completely to Him in trust and delight, in worshipful
adoration of His presence. It was precious to Him beyond words and
delighted and moved His heart to great tenderness.
July 29, 2015
I reached for Jesus, but I couldn't see Him. My longing for Him couldn't be quieted, though I tried, so I threw my voice out to Him-
“I love You
blind! I don’t care what I see or don’t see right now, I know You are with me
and in me and I love You and I long for You, Jesus Christ, Son of God!” I cried
out to Jesus.
Those words like a song with a strong beat and then there was a beat like a pause, in which I intended to turn my longing into faith. But it was only for a moment and the longing broke free in a sudden burning intensity. “Don’t You want me to be
with You completely?” I cried.
Oh My Jenny, My heart is bursting! It was the feeling in His voice caused me to remember that His longing is greater than mine, and that was enough to settle me.
August 10,
2015
When I
finished the prayer, in the echoing silence, I worried suddenly that I might
have gotten it all wrong or maybe embarrassed Jesus by some gaff, and so in my
spirit, I turned to Him for reassurance.
He was right there and pulled me into His arms with a murmuring of love
that I couldn’t understand in words. I could feel His
heart pounding. Some small part of the feeling that was stirring Him was passed into me, and it was that which reassured me and which I remembered many times later. It was the feeling of an athlete who is crouching at the line just moments before the race begins.
August 11,
2015
Overwhelmed
from the prayer of yesterday and actually afraid to pray today. But I did pray, and
it
had none of the intensity of yesterday and instead had all the calm of still
waters running placidly in a channel already formed by the passion and fire of
the prayer of yesterday, which came out with various degrees of physical
phenomena, such as gasping, my body becoming warm as
though a fire were kindled in it, especially the top of my head, which had the
quite distinct and uncomfortable sensation that it was on fire. I almost reached my hand up to
check, but I didn’t have any extra attention or time at that point in the prayer to do anything about it. I
was given over to the Holy Spirit and all my attention and trust was
focused on following His guiding, so I had to leave everything else in His
hands.
I couldn't get through it all at once, but had to stop from time to time. When I did, the atmosphere around me was liquid and heavy. I felt as if I were walking under water and the things around me appeared far away. It was like that when I went to get a glass of water. I was drawn back to my seat, sat back down and went right back into the rest of the prayer. I picked it right back up because in one sense, the prayer had a hold on me and not the other way around.
When I
began to pray, "deliver us from evil," grief took hold of me, and as I felt this grief
rise up, I said to myself in reassurance, “Oh boy, hold on. Hold on.” It’s like when one is
in the water and a huge wave comes and the wave begins to pull one up and as
one begins to rise up the wave, this feeling of being caught in something
massive and beyond oneself is frightening, but as the wave in this case being
the Holy Spirit, I yielded in trust, and prayed the prayer through all the
while outwardly caught up in the most intense expressions of heartbroken and
gut wrenching grief.
Except then I was caused to know some tiny glimpse of the complete redemption of God- caused to know that Heavenly Daddy was in fact coming, and my grief turned to relief so profound that I just went right
on sobbing.
Today I prayed and it came out simply and sweetly and then I knew I had to work
on the blog and I said to Jesus, “I’m so tired,” because I have been, and this
blog is a heavy weight and how I could lift it again and try to work
on it some more? Jesus said gently, Sweetheart,
go on. If I look at everything altogether, it is overwhelming, but if I simply
go on to the next thing, that I can do.
August 13,
2015
Went to
Flatrock park with Merissa and sat on the playground while she played in the
sand by the swings. It was a blustery, warm day with massive cloud formations
overhead. I could hear the sound of the water as
it ran over the rocky hillside.
I was one
moment sunk down into peaceful gratitude for everything around me and most of
all, my daughter, her face glowing
with happiness, and the next moment feeling almost dazed at the size of the
blog.
“Here I am,
Your servant of flesh and blood, and I have never seen You,” I said to Jesus in
resignation, because I would obey, and yet I have never had a manifested vision
of Jesus- a visitation, or been translated bodily into heaven, or any of those
other certain and settled forms of higher spiritual vision and experience.
You follow Me by faith, Jesus reminded me, as a patient teacher
would remind a student they loved.
“Yes.” What
else could I do but agree to this that He has told me many times?
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe, He said, His voice gentle and certain.
“Yes,” I
agreed, loving to hear His words and feeling better.
August 14,
2015
“May I?” I
asked, pausing as I reached for the head phones to listen to the cantata one more
time.
Oh Jenny, laughed Jesus, full of love.
“Well, I get
anxious!” I confessed, smiling.
But you follow Me so well.
“How could I
have said all that?” I asked myself in a moment of self-conscious horror- such
moments have been coming and going all day.
I said that, Jesus reminded me, immediately. All my anxiety evaporated, lifted away by the relief of remembering that those were His words first. They belong to Him; I could not speak them with any meaning if He had not spoken them first.
In a quiet
moment in between getting ready for the party, all my anxieties hit me at once and this sunk me
slowly down to the floor, where I knelt, still holding onto the sink, over
swept by a wave of horrified doubt.
“Jesus, I’m
so sorry!” I breathed, in deep contrition. How had I dared say those things, declare those things, what had
I done? I had posted it. “I’m so sorry, Jesus, please forgive me! Forgive me,
Jesus!” I whispered to Him in desperate plea.
Then I tried
to pull myself up, to remember that asking Him for
forgiveness was the exact wrong thing to be doing, that such a thing implied
that Jesus hadn’t led me faithfully as I trusted Him always to do, and that I
must trust Him.
So I said, “Thank You for the growth of my faith through this, thank You for
the good You will bring out of this, thank You for guiding me
always faithfully along.”
I rested my
head against the edge of the counter and watched the sunlight through the
dining room windows as it was shining over the top of the fence in the early
evening. I felt Jesus close to me. I was surrounded by His compassion.
Remember? Jesus asked, fondly, pointing out that I had been in just that physical position and place before.
“Yes, I
remember, thank You,” I said gratefully. The experience to which He referred had been like a sign post to mark a beginning- something which had brought hard things, and then a rich harvest.
But still my
anxieties came back. “Thank You for the good You will bring out of this, thank You for
guiding me so faithfully along,” I said, mechanically, but the words seemed to
have lost all their meaning and did not help at all.
You’ve reached the end of your strength, Jesus pointed out, with loving
mercy. What you did took you past
your current limit. Your faith will not reach any further, but My faith carries
you even when you have reached the end of yours. I will carry you now.
His
compassion washed through me, easing the strain and I let go of all
effort and trusted Jesus exactly as I was. I knew, because He had told me
before, that when I reach the end of my faith it’s not the terrible thing that
it appears, because that is where it grows. It’s like a muscle tissue that gets
broken in exercise, but new muscle grows in the broken places, and that is how
the muscle grows. It feels painful and like a step back, but really, it’s the
beginning of new growth.
I am better in all things than you know yet and you've only begun to know My goodness, Jesus said to me, later.
August 27,
2015
I thanked
Jesus for the direction He had given me and went about my day, and then going down to pray and
leaned back against the couch, resting as though back in His arms, letting go
of any need to be greater or stronger or in any way more than what I am- being
only and just what I am, which is small, often confused, sometimes
contradictory, not knowing in which direction to go and if left to myself,
often heading right off in the wrong direction- that is, I am just like a
sheep, and there is no need to pretend otherwise or to be ashamed of this. The
only thing necessary is to trust Jesus completely.
This way, my
prayers were simple, sweet and peaceful, carried as I was in His arms, close to
His heart of love, trusting in His goodness, faithfulness, and grace.
Again, it came to me clearly exactly how I must blog- I must go back to the very beginning and tell the whole story, so again I said, “I will."
Jesus' love
poured down over me in a huge stream and He said, I love you, and I was
drawn into the love, intoxicating, heady, sweet and personal.
September 17, 2015
Before
I posted the September 11th post, on the night before, I felt waves of strong
resistance to posting it. This resistance wasn’t coming in the form of
shame or anxiety about what people would think or offending others or getting
it wrong, this resistance was in the form of flat out fear of bodily or
spiritual harm. As usual, I had to go into the closet. As usual, my fear peaked
as I was in there. I was in there, putting Keith’s shirts on hangers and I was
having to be very slow and deliberate, because my hands were clumsy. I
was having a hard time thinking about what I was doing because I felt this
increasing fear that there was something terrible behind me and it wanted to
hurt me and I felt the fear insisting that it was going to hurt me, insisting
that I would turn and see it and seeing it would be undone by the horror of it
being there.
That
was the thought pressing up on my mind and I was looking up to heaven- or the
closet ceiling- and like a laser beam I was focused on Jesus. I wasn’t seeing
Him or feeling Him, but I was insisting that I was under His authority. The pressure between my determined focus on the authority of the Lord Jesus
Christ and the pressure of fear that was coming up against me from the back
was intense, making it difficult to focus on the closet hangers.
Then,
in the midst of this mounting pressure, I felt the lightest touch of the Holy Spirit- gentle, pure and full of light on
my shoulder, like a breath of air or a beam of light making a break in the pressure.
Because of this, I was reminded that Jesus
really was absolutely in authority over me, and that the truest thing I could do in that moment would be to praise Jesus regardless of what I was
feeling or even if I should see something and so in that moment of light, I lifted
up my whole heart and spirit to Jesus with naked trust and said in obedience to
Jesus and in deference to His absolute authority, “I will.” By which I meant, I
will trust You through this, knowing I am under Your complete authority, and trusting You all the way through- I am Yours and I love You
and one day I will see You face to face and I will understand everything and
everything will come clear and all this will not compare the weight of the glory of being with You and knowing Your complete work.”
As
soon as I lifted up my heart in trust to Jesus, I felt a horrible rush of that presence behind
me as though it were roaring and screaming in desperation, and with terrible, awful
rage, seemed to come right toward me to devour me, and I did see quite a terrible image, and
fear swept in a cold wind over my entire body, but I was standing still before Jesus, looking right up to Him by faith.
It
was an illusion. It was a lie. The fear lies. It passed right over me and dissolved and was gone. I came out of
the closet and I was light as air, almost trembling and filled with relief,
release and love. Tears filled my eyes and I laughed and the whole room seemed to be filled with God and the company
of God, whom I felt had all been through something similar, and so I felt their empathy, delight, compassion and joy. I felt as if heaven had invisibly invaded the room, or that the curtain between was so thin that I could feel the atmosphere of heaven. If you think I am crazy, I won’t
blame you, but that is what it felt like in the room right then.
Jesus was there and I knew, in this absolute and immediate way, that I really would
see Jesus face to face and that I was His own and He was my Shield and my
exceedingly great Reward, and I worshiped and adored Him and bowed down before
His feet in worshipful adoration and gratitude.
September 19, 2015
“I don’t have
to get stronger! In my weakness, Your strength is perfect! But it’s my faith in
You that will grow deeper and deeper all my life until I see You face to face and know the full depth of all You have done, which right now is far beyond my
comprehension and which even then will cast me down before You in worship, and all the glory will be Yours! I will have no credit and will own
nothing at all, but You! I will have You and be fully satisfied to have You,
all the glory of doing everything will be Yours, and so between us all will
be perfectly right.”
Yes, Jesus said, strongly. Write it down.
*
Grace to you and peace [inner calm and spiritual well-being]
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I thank my God always for you because of the grace of God
which was given you in Christ Jesus,
so that in everything you were [exceedingly] enriched in Him,
in all speech [empowered by the spiritual gifts]
and in all knowledge [with insight into the faith].
In this way our testimony about Christ
was confirmed and established in you,
so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift
[which comes from the Holy Spirit],
as you eagerly wait [with confident trust]
for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ [when He returns].
And He will also confirm you to the end
[keeping you strong and free of any accusation,
so that you will be] blameless and beyond reproach
in the day [of the return] of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is faithful
[He is reliable, trustworthy and ever true to His promise—
He can be depended on],
and through Him you were called into fellowship
with His Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord.
-I Corinthians 1:3-9, AMP
