In the Middle of the Mess by Sheila Walsh

Author:Sheila Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2017-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

The good news of salvation is that you get to be honest; you don’t have to bury your emotions.

* * *

Our daily struggles are not as weighty as what Christ carried to God in prayer. Are we facing death on a Roman cross? No. But we still carry a million weights and fall down in a million little ways. Some of us struggle with dark things like suicidal thoughts and depression. Some struggle with things like overeating or anxiety. Those things might seem insignificant to others, but they are huge to us and still trip us up. No matter our struggle, a daily practice of confessing the truth of our emotions to Christ—even the hardest truths—helps so much. Through this daily confession, we come into the realization of how much God loves us. We have the privilege of sitting in that love, of meditating on it.

“Meditating?” you might ask. Yes, meditating.

Perhaps you were raised in a tradition where meditation wasn’t part of the spiritual disciplines. That was true for me. But this is what I’ve discovered: If you know how to worry, if you know how to stuff away your feelings and obsess over them, then you know how to meditate. Instead, you can recognize the worry, confess it, release it to God, and change what it is you’re thinking about. You do this day in and day out, letting go, and letting go, and letting go. In time, the practice of letting go, of recognizing God’s love, becomes second nature. It becomes your meditation.

David wrote, “I lie awake thinking of you, meditating on you through the night” (Ps. 63:6). The Hebrew word for meditate here is hagah. It means “to mutter or to coo like a dove.” I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to a dove’s cooing. Such a lovely persistent sound. The idea here is to keep turning the words of Scripture over and over in our minds until the truth sinks from our heads to the deepest places in our spirits.

Be still and know that I am God. Let go. This is an invitation to you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.