Resembling a puzzle of Poly-phobia....
I was talking to someone yesterday and we we wondering what would it be like at our current age if we never knew Jesus...
As I was thinking through of the many things that I have been through my life and I can only come to think about how I would be in and out of rehab and mental institutions and finding myself socially handicapped. That is what I would be if I were not a Christian.
Very often when we live our lives in such that we are surrounded by God and believers, we fail to see how much God has changed our lives and affected us in so many ways. Much like the little awareness of our breathing until when air is absent.
I am a person plagued with fear. All my life, there are so many things that I fear and even up till today, I discover new fears that I never thought I would come to face. My fears put me to be a person that takes very low risks because I am not capable of facing oppositions. I avoid many things in life, I quit things half way, I give excuses as a result of it. And with an imagination like mine, my fears are only fueled by my poor sense of reality and the fiction of my imagination.
I play safe, I build walls, I become reserved, I hang on to only things that have proven me right. I am a hermit in its shell that does not venture out. But what I am simply portraying is a possibility if I am left to my own devices.
But I am not all that, not all whacked up as I think I could be, not crazy as I think I am. Simply because Jesus is in the mix. I am by no means saying that all who are not Christians are down right broken in the obvious manner, but I am looking to myself and see how even as a Christian I am still so very messed up. Every battle that I faced has been laced with traces of God that has delivered me through so much, and I can only imagine if I never knew Jesus.
There was safety being with my parents and I hung on to them so tightly until I had to make this move to the States. But my thinking that God would protect me was not exactly the way I imagined it to be and instead God lead me to a land where all my fears can be realized. I cannot begin to list down all those fears here as I may take all day but more so is that the more I list, the more I will come to realize new ones a long the way.
God's intention was not to shelter me all a long, but to allow me to exercise my faith in Him. America has been a ground where my fears stare down at me from every direction and I had to make a choice, and that choice was and is to stand in faith or falter away from hiding.
Exercising faith is not without pain for a struggle to see God and desire to be obedient is not without cost. Just as Jacob walked away with a limp but limping in victory he did. So as pain reminds me of how difficult it can be, it also reminds me that God is truly faithful even among my fears.
I have come to peace with the fact that my fears will always linger around me and I would have to face them sooner or later with confidence of these battle scars that are all over me. But I am still standing, though at times feeling the pain to want to fall, I am very intentional to still stand.
And as I recognize and discover myself for who I am until the day I die, I am just like the man born blind awaiting to bring glory to Jesus. My fears are all around me so that Jesus is glorified somehow through what He would use me.
No comments:
Post a Comment