SCRIPTURE: “Is not my word like fire,” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” Jeremiah 23:29 NIV
THOUGHT: Jill Phillips wrote a jarringly honest lyric in a 2003 song titled, “Wrecking Ball,” (not to be confused with Miley Cyrus’ song a decade later, which may have been honest and jarring, but lacking in hope and a few other things!). Phillips penned:
Piece together these little mysteries / It isn’t hard to see the writing on the wall / Triumph and tragedy, only God can be / Both the builder and the wrecking ball.
The thing about truth is it can be very uncomfortable, but if we learn to love it, we find ourselves more open to God’s shaping. If I really trust that God knows and loves me too much to let me stay the way I am, I will begin to see him in the building up of my life as well as the wreckage I must face. Loving the God of fire and hammer is loving the whole of God. We will not want to stay the same, we will yearn to be changed and often frustrated by the lack of visible progress.
But rebuilding on ruins is a tricky thing as any architect can tell you. What God is building probably doesn’t match the vision we have in our own heads, but it’s good, even great. We have fallen into the hands of an architect – a living God whose words over us are sharper than a two-edged sword, perfectly capable of separating a mess from a magnum opus.
SONG: Wrecking Ball https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AbBeNrH_d0
PRAYER: When I gave you complete access to my life, God, I gave you the right to be both builder and wrecking ball. Forgive me for running when things I’ve trusted in more than you start falling down. Complete your work in me.
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Blogger Amy Clemens is the author of Walking When You’d Rather Fly: Meditations on Faith After the Fall. In it she explores childhood sexual abuse and how it impacted her faith (or lack thereof) for four decades. You’ll find not only her story, but better yet, the Big Story of God.
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