Wait with hope for the Lord. Be strong, and let your heart be courageous. Yes, wait with hope for the Lord. (Psalm 27:14 GW)
This week I was thinking about my resistance to an author’s suggestion of deep introspection and cleaning out of our messy interior lives. I came to the image of a garbage dump or landfill. Yep. Probably not your first thought, but stay with me a moment.
Our lives consist of such a mix of all sorts of things. In the many layers of our life are moments we have lost but would treasure, experiences bland and mundane, and memories we’d much rather leave buried in the past.
When we we walking through life in relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, seeking to honor the Father, and led by the Holy Spirit, sometimes we need to do a bit of internal work. God knows exactly everything that has been deposited in our internal worlds, from the amazing and perfectly godly, to the horrifically evil and everything in between. Thankfully – and by his grace – he rarely will take an individual and upend the whole “landfill” of life. Imagine having every single moment of your life stirred up and floating in front of your senses. To me, that would be an extremely overwhelming experience.
But what if, because of his mercy for us, God only shows us a few things at a time that he needs to work on within us? Like a gas vent in a landfill, God may want to expurge bitterness or unforgiveness, or anger, or judgementalism, or pride, or anything else that weighs us down and doesn’t allow us to love him, love others, and love ourselves. He wants to help us clean out the piles and when we surrender these burdens to him, he casts them “as far as the east is from the west.” When we allow him to do the work, he cleans out the gunk, and smooths over the rough parts in our landfill.
Why would he do this?
So we are freed to live the abundant live and live in love.