It Starts Small

I stood dumbfounded in my junkyard. It couldn’t be that simple could it? Just believe and trust? Wasn’t there supposed to be some great battle…. God was going to slay a mighty dragon and it’d be weeks and months of battling…..

Is it that simple?

Why can’t it be that simple? I was sitting on a bench looking at the desolate place around me. It wasn’t intimidating anymore. There were hills of rundown ruble. It was a sad place. Like a prairie with nothing but dirt. The dirt was dry and had eroded over the what were once piles of junk. All that grew was what looked some sort of vine weed.

I answered back after thinking about it, because everyday of my life has felt like a struggle to just breath. I’ve felt like something has always been suffocating me. Chaining me to the ground and I’ve wanted to be free but couldn’t find the keys to unlock myself. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I’ve just had this existence and struggle is all I’ve ever known.

I wondered a bit more about the simplicity of God. We humans sure make a complicated mess and God’s solution is simple, just trust him. He is not gray in this area. Is as plain as black and white. Either I kept doing what I had always been doing or I simply resign my own control and power and give it to him and just trust in him.

Sitting in that junkyard I asked Jesus, what’s next? I trust you know where we need to go next. This place is sad. I felt the sadness and drought. I remembered reading in God’s word about tilling the ground. This place needed life. Something was choking the life out of my heart.

I asked Jesus, that vine over there must represent something that I have done to choke my own life out of me. I can’t think of anything I’ve read that can be described as a vine. I know I have no unconfessed sin, so it has to be more than sin.

I walked over to a half buried pile of rubble and looked deeper into the mess. The mess was no longer what looked liked crushed stacks of cars. It was faces. It memories. I knew the faces and I knew the memories. Out of each of them this vine was growing. I reached out and touched the vine. My hand was immediately consumed by pain and hurt. I pulled my hand back.

This was my trauma. This was all the things I had suffered. This was all the horrible things I had heard people speak to me. This was all the violence I had been subjected to. This was the cruelty, lies, deception, manipulation…all the evil acts of people in my life. Oddly, I felt the pain of it, but wasn’t scared or in fear. I wanted to deeply understand it. I reached out and touched it again.

I could taste a bitterness in my mouth. Similar to when they’d clear my line after chemo. It tasted awful. Bitterness. This was my bitterness. Somehow my pain and hurting was linked to my bitterness. What on earth is bitterness?

The Webster says it caused by or expressive of severe pain, grief, or regret. Ooooof. I knew exactly what this pile was. I need to understand my own bitterness and what it had done to me and how it had shaped me.