Soft Heart, Curious Mind

You’re about to walk into a trial that will change your life drastically, and you’re going into it stubborn, timid, and afraid. 

But you’ll walk out differently. Your stubbornness will be refined into conviction, your timidity into courage, and your fear into a holy confidence, not in yourself, but in who you belong to. 

You will sit in doubt, anger, fear, and shame, but Jesus will sit there with you. 

It will hurt, let it.

It will break you, let it.

Because the God you serve will love you back to life and heal what others broke. 

He will teach you to let light shine through your scars, not as a testament to your own strength, but as a testament of the grace the Lord has shown you in every season. 

But first it will be dark. You will feel backed into a corner, and there will seem to be no way out. 

Through tears, you will try to remind yourself that God always makes a way, and He does. 

But first, He’s going to instill some grit and strength in you that only comes from time in the fire with the Holy Spirit changing you, so that when the sea parts, you have the faith and confidence in Him to get up and walk through it.

You’ll learn what it means to wait on the Lord, but you won’t always do it well. 

You will scream into the blackness of the early morning sky, “God, where are you? Can you hear me?” Not realizing He’s still as close as He’s always been, right there with you.

You’ll learn what it means to worship, to really worship. In the storm. In the chaos. In the dark. The Lord will be your joy.

And on the mornings when you look at your life, and it feels like you’re constantly losing, you’ll finally find that the only thing that can’t be taken from you is the only thing you truly need – Jesus. 

You’ll see prayers answered, some with a resounding ‘yes’ and some with a difficult ‘no’, but the Lord’s plans will always prove better than your own.

So, the sea will part, the doors will open, and you’ll walk out of the fire a completely different person than who walked in. 

By the grace of God alone, you’ll look back and count it all joy. Knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

The last thing I would say is this – you don’t have this under control, and that’s okay because Jesus isn’t asking you to; He’s just asking that you surrender it to Him. 

Be obedient in your walk with the Lord; your confidence is in Him, not yourself. 

On the other side of this, you will quite literally watch Him suit you up in spiritual armor, prepared to follow Him into battle. 

But to get there, the road is long, and first we have to walk through fire.

Because now, when you get knocked down, you see Jesus there, with gentleness in His smile but fierceness in His eyes, and in a perfect combination of compassion and exhortation, He reaches out His hand and says, “Don’t let them take you out of the fight.” He pulls you back to your feet, straightens your armor, hands you your sword, and leads you right back into the good fight – ready to endure, and never alone.