What I Can Do

When I was worshipping at the beginning of the year, the Lord gave me the word ‘endure.’ As time has gone on, nothing outwardly catastrophic has happened, but he has been disciplining me in ways that make me say ‘endure.’ One thing I have felt the Holy Spirit tell me to pray is that the Lord would break me down. Asking for the him to break you is a scary thing because he has ears, people! And he answers us. But, here, we experience immeasurably more than we could ever ask for.

Early on this year, He kept giving me a vision of waves ceaselessly crashing over me (he knows I love the ocean). I had ideas, but I did not know exactly what He meant by this. But as the months have progressed, he has been calling me back to my failures, to observe my sin and not run away from it. To know, I mean really know, how wretched I am.

He has been calling me to places at the end of myself. Where my sinful, sinful heart has no more love or mercy to give.  I was worshipping and ended up in tears, “I hate this world.”

I had come to the place at the end of myself. I had poured out all that I had and the lord whispered, “keep pouring.” “POURING WHAT?!” I quipped. And this was it. This was exactly where he wanted me. This is exactly where he wants us all to be. The Lord loves to make beautiful things. He LOVES to make beauty out of brokenness. I had hit rock bottom right beside me. I looked beside me, “Do you get it, daughter? Do you get it?” Jesus said.

 During a night of worship at Regent, the Holy Spirit came and poured out big time. Singing and wailing and sobbing prevailed as we soaked in prayer. Normally, I am a HUGE crier in the Holy Spirit. But the Lord had me laughing all night as I felt him healing the room and he rejoiced, “Look what I can do. Look what I can do.”

Tonight I went to the release of a local Christian musician’s EP. “Love does not grow on trees,” he sang. I remembered an article I read on the physical death of Jesus: what nerves the nails in his wrist obliterated, the way his lungs felt, his body so severely scourged that he was dead in three hours. I remembered the scriptures: the Pharisees hating Jesus, the disciples rebuking Jesus, the pupil betraying Jesus, the masses killing Jesus. Jesus suffered excruciatingly (late 16th cent.: from Latin excruciat- ‘tormented,’ from the verb excruciare based on crux, cruc- ‘a cross’) in this world. And He suffered by his grace. Gracegracegracegracegracegracegracegracegracegracegracegracegrace.  Tears streamed down my face. “Grace, Anna, grace.”

I remembered a speaker talking about Matthew 5:7 who explained that we can only give love, mercy, and grace if we receive love, mercy, and grace. They are not currencies that we accrue on our own. The reason God wants us at the end of ourselves is because it is there that we let our souls receive these things from their one, true Source.  Grace is not a one-time deal. We must perpetually let ourselves receive it, every single moment. We must LIVE in grace.

I am lying at the spot on the beach where broken waves rush over me. The water is the perfect temperature, the perfect color; the water is indescribably perfect. It runs through my hair. It abounds around me. It pervades the deepest parts of me. I realize that I should not be able to breath. My lungs expire. I panic. I open my mouth, but… I breathe. I tepidly try another breath, then another, until I am making joyful noise to the Rock of my salvation. “Exist here. Exist in my grace. Let it cover you like this perfect water covers you. Rest in grace. Be immersed in grace. Live in grace.”

 

In our helplessness, we are sustained by ceaseless grace.

1 Oh come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! 2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! 3 For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. 4 In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. 5 The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. 6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker! 7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice, 8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, 9 when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. 10 For forty years I loathed that generation and said, "They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways." 11 Therefore I swore in my wrath, "They shall not enter my rest."

[Psalm 95]

"Suffer Not" -Ian Thornton

"These Are the Days" -Natalie Merchant (picture yourself running through a field of buttercups with Jesus)