achingly distant, drawing near....

He has the key to my heart. 

A few days back, I was reading a devotional by Beth Moore, and in it, she called us, the female readers, "lavishly loved daughters".

At that time, and for too many days to count before that, I did not feel like a lavishly loved daughter.   I felt far away, distant, forgotten and a failure.

Wrapping up 2010 and on the edge of 2011, I did not want to continue feeling that way.  

In a space of a handful of days, God, my father, Jesus, my king and Holy Spirit, my companion, have began touching my heart and leading me toward a new relationship in 2011.  It feels so precarious on my part, that I will do something to spoil it, blow it, like I do with most relationships.   But as I shared a couple days ago, part of this journey is memorizing his word, and my first verse shows, it is not up to me....  (Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ. Phil 1:6)

I am reading along with Marla and others the book Your Secret Name by Kary Oberbrunner.  (I am also reading two other books*, jumping between the three and it is amazing how they are all twining together, with the scripture memorization, to draw my aching heart closer to my Father.)  

In the first two chapters of Your Secret Name this is what spoke to me:

 I need this.  I started this book feeling so achingly distant, grouchy, hurting, far far away from God...I felt unloved.   The introduction before the first two chapters caused me to underline the verse:

" He has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also set eternity in the human heart."  Eccl 3:11     

 A thaw of hope, that he could STILL make something beautiful out of the mess that is me.  And that I know the longing of eternity in my heart.  I feel that as a homesick ache. 

The author writes "we're all homesick for a place we've never been and so we live as nomads groping toward a destination we can't quite define."  How true that is , looking, seeking, aching, trying to be fulfilled through lesser things.   "we buy the lie that a new {____________}, will somehow dispel the hurt we feel in our hearts..." (p. 12)

The author talks abut the verses in Revelation that says God has given us a secret name, and that we often do not think about such realms of destiny and legacy.   I think of that coupled with the words Beth used, when she called me a "lavishly loved daughter."

We walk around with a secret identity, members of a secret kingdom, yet we get stuck in the wallowing mud, and false attempts for significance around us, and forget who we are and why we are here and what our real status and name is.     In our wait for our returning King and bridegroom, we forget.

As I was reading these chapters, I could hear my boys in the next room watching Lord of the Rings.   They watch it over and over, on the weekends, when I let them watch  a DVD.  They keep coming back to this one.   I remember, at age 20, going up to the stairway landing of my apartment complex in Berkeley, I was reading Lord of the Rings, and paused, wistful and aching, for nobility.  For someone like Strider whose real (secret) name was Aragon and whose real identity was the returning King, ..someone like that to be real, to come into our lives and to raise us up to something more....  

I did not realize at the time, that we truly do have that.  His name is Jesus.   He is our coming King.  We are his people.  We long for that which he is about and we get bogged down in our past, our labels, our focus and forget who we are and what we are about.

Kary talks about the names or labels we gather in life (or for me, that I put on myself) (p. 13)... they are pretty ugly.   failure, self-centered, lazy, inconsistent, unfaithful, broken momma.  unwanted, angry, mean, even.  So being knocked around and muddied by the world, I let the whispers of the enemy, like Wormtongue to King Theoden in LOTR, poison me further.   Add to that, the false," hollow promise" names I think would bring fulfillment,(and really don't) and can never meet:  super-momma, wife....

I love the honesty in this book; the willingness to question and say what we may think but are reluctant to put into words.  That God's patience and timing perplexes us. That we do not undersatnd how He can be loving and powerful, yet seem not to intervene....  I am ok to sit on those questions for a while (forever?); as I learn more about who I am by learning more about who He is.

God is so good to bring this book, *(and the Phillip Yancy's Prayer,) into my life at this season.  I feel He is stirring, and drawing me closer to Him and that this year, does not have to be like last year.  That we are moving on and He has plans of love for me and mine.   That He is moving us on, as He carries us on toward completion....

I know this has been a wandering post.  I apologize for that.   I would recommend this book and the real-along.  If you want to read what others thought about the first two chapters, check out Marla's blog.

We are His "lavishly loved daughters".