I don’t know about you, but for me at least, trust is such a hard thing. I tend to carry the scars of life and the wounds from past relationships like a shield around my heart. It gets in the way of every relationship I have and I’ve learned how to disguise it pretty well. And what that ends up boiling down to is that I try and hold God at the same distance that I hold others with the belief that I can actually disguise my walls from Him.
LOL FALSE.
I don’t know if you’ve found this out yet, but there is absolutely NO hiding anything from God. Which honestly, brings me so much peace because every time I attempt to hide my heart from the Lord, He reminds me that He already knows so I just have to bring it to Him with no fear of rejection involved.
Lean Back by Capital City Music has become sort of prayer for me over the last few weeks as God has begin to reveal truth to me about the walls that I’ve lived behind in an attempt to protect my heart for so long. The songs that I can use as prayers to return my heart to truth are such incredible gifts to me. There is something so powerful in singing our hearts back to the Father and declaring truth over ourselves even when we don’t always believe it for ourselves.
Let me put the lyrics so you can soak them in for a second:
You will never leave
Your love sustaining me
Before I even knew what love was
You’ve brought me here to rest
And given me space to breathe
So I’ll stay still until it sinks in
I will lean back in the loving arms
Of a beautiful Father
Breathe deep and know that He is good
He’s a love like no other
Now I can see Your love is better
Than all the others that I’ve seen
I am breathing deep all of Your goodness
Your loving-kindness to me
Honestly, I am undone in the first line. So often we base our understanding of love on how other PEOPLE love us and now how the FATHER loves us. And those are two totally different things. Because we as people are imperfect, fallen beings. We are ALL guilty of hurting someone else, whether on purpose or by accident. Because regardless of the fact that I could list of the pain other people have put me through because they didn’t love me “as they should have”, I can’t negate the fact that I have done damage to the hearts of others too. And if I can’t even claim my own love as something that is sustaining, then why do I try to rely on someone else’s love for me?
But the love of God is so perfect and good that it is sustaining. He will never leave us so we can absolutely depend on Him. And that is some GOOD news to me because that means I don’t have to earn His love. His goodness is so real and tangible that we can breath deep of it just like the oxygen we breathe in for our lungs. Because just as oxygen sustains us in the physical, God’s goodness is sustaining in the spiritual. And I don’t know about you, but I love that. Because I surely cannot sustain myself. I stay falling apart honestly. So why would I not run to the Father that sustains me?
I think so often we measure life up to our own standard of good and not God’s. So when bad things start happening around us or to us in life we have all of these doubts and questions because it’s not good and there is no possible way in our minds that good could ever result. And through that we lose sight of our Father who is the very essence of good. There are most definitely things in life that happen that God would never call good. But God is a God of restoration and healing, so if we are breathing in His goodness as our sustenance, even when the bad of life happens we still have hope.
The other day, I saw this little girl run to her father and jump up into his arms for a hug. And in that moment, God spoke to my heart and said “That’s what kind of Father I am.” See, that girl had no questions as to whether or not her dad was going to catch her. He had never let her fall or second-guessed catching her and dropper her. She trusted that this man that loved her completely, protected her, wanted her good, held her work together when it was falling apart, was her safe place. I mean even a child knows you don’t go run and jump into the arms of someone that isn’t going to catch you, right? That’s a risky move.
And that is such a picture of our relationship with the Father. He is our safe place. He is the one that holds us when our world is falling apart. He never lets us fall and never lets us down. He sent His only son to carry all of our imperfections and die on a cross for us so that we could be adopted into his Kingdom and be called sons and daughters. I mean talk about a love like no other. My dad would have never let me die for someone else, no matter how much he loved them. But God sent Jesus to die for me, FULLY KNOWING just how short of His standard I would fall.
That baffles my mind every time. Just wow. What a love.
Reality is, you can’t lean back and still support yourself. It’s counterintuitive. You can try it, but eventually you will fall. I think that sometimes we try and go through life like that though, kind of leaning into the Father but really just leaning enough to look lop-sided but still support ourselves. We come into the relationship holding our definitions of love and goodness and what we have seen fathers look like never let go enough to allow God to become the definition.
But I truly believe that God holds His hand out to each of us and invites us into something deeper and bigger than our definitions. Into a relationship where God is our sustenance before we even really know what love is. Where we can breathe in the goodness of God like oxygen regardless of our circumstance. Where resting in the arms of the Father is a natural position and we run to meet His open arms every time because that is where we long to be.
Deep Diving 