The Vast Stillness

Recently, we went on a trip to Monument Valley. We also did a road trip tour of the Southwest we had never seen…New Mexico. I learned a lot on that trip. I am still processing so much about who I am, who God is, and who humanity is.

I learned…

Depravity is right in front of me.

Poverty is hard and dark.

Openness does not always need to mean emptiness.

Recognition of how small I am is necessary.

A world in denial of the I Am is very real.

I learned…

I really took time to think through things. I was up early in the morning lying still and listening. I was listening to the breathing of my son and my mother, in their beds sleeping. There are a few moments of peace. Total peace and assurance of that deep down, never-ending peace. I know that it is there all the time, but my humanness. But then the I Am is there in the stillness. Quietly speaking to the unholy that they have been made holy.

Today Matt Chandler’s sermon affirmed that our holiness is fully of God. It is who He fully is even more so than love. I had never seen this fundamental attribute of God in such a foundational way that Holy comes before Love. It puts into perspective the lesson I embraced and wrestled with on our vacation…how small I must be.

But by His profound holiness to refine his love with fire, would I be a fully depraved human. God has sung me to him. He has whispered in those darkest and brightest times. He pushed and pulled me until I realized there is no one other than Jesus Christ surviving the refiner’s fire. A fire so hot and pure; a fire full of blinding holiness that it incinerates everything within its scope.

And how with all of this evidence around us of how man’s reach is so finite, so many live in denial. It is true that we are lovers of self and lovers of sin. Which foundationally is the lover of self. It is something that wakes me up at night thinking of all my nothingness and all my transgressions and how something so finite and as small as me has been captured by the holiness of God.

Why me and not them?

Why me?

Why?

Because he went back for the one knowing that nothing was out of his scope. He is everything to us, right down to the very breath we can even breathe.

I am that I am.

Quite simple actually.

Quite a large concept with quite a small word.

Small in pronunciation, yet profound in meaning.

#findyourfrontier #soulfood #soulsearching #loverofmysoul #iamthatiamisbigger