Life-Changing Truth

It is high time for me to get real and live this faith journey the way God wrote it. I've spent too much of my pent-up life doing what I thought was right, but missing it entirely. I was plagued by a disease of pretense. I so desperately wanted life to fit in a box and make sense, and make myself presentable enough to be accepted and loved. Not anymore. I can't do it. If Christ came to make me free, I can't be bound by the strain I put on myself any longer.

I think I've been fed a pack of lies. I digested them, believed them, and acted on them. I wasn't sure if they were quite right, but they were presented in such a confident way that I thought they must have been. I didn't know how incredibly toxic they were until they made my heart sick. My gut wrenched with such a pain that I knew something wasn't right. This isn't the abundant life that Jesus came to bring. This wasn't freedom. Something is seriously wrong.

Galatians 3:1 says, "O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth...?" Somewhere along the line, truth has been distorted. We have believed things that are not Scriptural but they sounded so convincing that we thought they must be. Sometimes there is just the slightest of nuance that makes it appear that two ideas must be saying the same thing. That we shouldn't get hung up on the semantics because it doesn't make much difference anyway. That's where we get hooked. The enemy deceives oh so subtly to draw us in. We don't even see it coming until we are so bound up we don't know what to do.

That gut-wrenching feeling is what told me loud and clear it was time for me to high-tail it into counseling. It is the most thrilling adventure I've embarked on. I'm too excited about it to keep it to myself. I want to live out loud and bring others with me. On the other side of this intense heart surgery is freedom! Healing!

This pursuit of wholeness is a whole lot of work. No longer can I be satisfied with looking the other way, or busying my life so that I don't notice. Scratching the surface won't do. This going deep is a lot of hard looking at what I believed, and going even deeper to find out what is at the core of it. Repairing wounds that haven't been tended. Stitch by stitch, it is a supremely significant time out with my Healer.

There are lines of Sara Groves songs that just cut through the chase and say it straight. She has a way of putting deep and profound things into words and pictures. A few of her songs are just going right to that place where my heart is being healed. To name a few, check out Just Showed Up or Something Changed. Give the lyrics a read if you have a moment. (Better yet, listen to the songs...but I don't know if there is a way to connect the music here.) It puts into words the significance of being changed by something huge. That something huge is God -- it's Truth -- it's the healing that the Healer Himself brings.

I think there are things that we have accepted as truth. They sound right, we've been raised by it, we hear it so much that it has become part of our belief system. The problem is, it won't hold up with Scripture. In fact, if we bother to really turn the idea upside down and ask what it is really saying, we might find out that we were missing the mark of what Jesus came to do. I wonder how many take the time to bring our belief out into the light, look at its angles, and find out if this is what Jesus is really saying. Or is there somewhere along the line that we've bought into a lie? Are we actually a Pharisee thinking we've got it all figured out and that we no longer need to call into question what we have established must certainly be true?

I am in a desperate search of truth. Not what people think is true, not what has been said is true, but a radical revolution of taking it up with Christ Himself. He is the Way, the Truth, the Life. I need to hear it from HIM. I have spent too much of my life getting ripped up by things that were never of Him in the first place. I'm ready to clear them out and be healed.