Gentleness

When Chris died and I found myself sitting in my pastor's office, I remember asking him "So am I crazy or are you supposed to feel this way?"  You can fill in the blank for what I was feeling.  WHAT I was feeling doesn't really matter so much actually, it was just all new and I felt so helplessly at the mercy of feelings that were swamping me and I was so very much needing grounding.  Well, I have not only a good pastor but an EXCELLENT one.  He gave me the advice, the admonition actually, to be gentle with myself.  So I then drove home tossing in my mind the definition of being gentle with oneself.

In the last six months I have learned a lot about being gentle with myself, about the nature of all of us and our need to care for ourselves as human beings.  The first thing is that things take the time they take and we grieve what and when we need to grieve and it's all okay.  I've learned to say when I can't do things and I've learned to pursue the things that are healing.  I think we naturally gravitate towards healing.  We gravitate toward healing best, however, when we feel the hurt and lean into it enough to let it teach us.

And I've learned a lot about prayer.  God can handle ANYTHING I have to say and its important for me to say it.  It's easy to sit back and say "Well God knows everything so He obviously knows my heart and I can't say it right anyway," but I NEED to say it.  In laying my heart out before God and crying out to Him I let go of my own need to control and direct my life and give that to Him, where it truly belongs.  That's a part of being gentle with myself too.  I can't guide my life, I can only align my heart with God and go with that.  Gravitating towards healing is gravitating towards the God who heals.

The immature part of my soul wants to say "Make my life easier" and yet the call is simply to surrender my life and realize that easy or hard, it's given over to God.  The real challenge in life isn't to ask for better circumstances, it's to engage God amidst whatever circumstances we have and be honest about them.

God has this very graceful way of meeting us in the hurt and bringing genuine peace...it's the Living Water thing.  And things take the time they take and protecting your soul's need for that time is pretty important.  God is at work...just stay in relationship with Him...and He will transform your life.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh