Thursday, March 20, 2008

In Looking we Hear God

12:11 AM by Christi Bowman

Yet another post...3 posts within 24 hours...at least this one will post after 12:00 am...so I get off on a technicality.

Seriously though...God is AMAZING...and I just can't believe that He is as involved with me as He is. God is on the move in my life in a BIG way...no, a HUGE way. He speaks to me, He shows me things when I ask...and even when I don't think to. He has given me a small picture of how big He is, and I find that glimpse of Him to be overwhelming! I feel His presence, and it brings me to tears. He lives in me...I am His tabernacle...and He is too much...I am finding myself to be to little...I can't contain Him...I am ready to burst. For the first time in my life I am experiencing God...and it keeps happening over and over again. Academically I have always known Him, but I have questioned A LOT, doubted even more, and have come pretty close to throwing in the towel.

Kevin and I were talking about God waking me up, and I asked, why now. When I said I came pretty close to throwing in the towel, I meant it. I have done some pretty terrible things in my life...things that could have been avoided had I been awakened years earlier. And it is not that I haven't sought after God...many times I have yearned for change...and in true "Footprints in the Sand" like fashion, looking back...I can see that He was there the whole time...but I was NOT awake. I may have called on Him...and sure He "carried" me through...but it never stuck. It seemed He carried me so that I could run head long into another mess...and because of free will...I guess He had to let me. Even though I longed to be free from whatever current situation was getting me into trouble, I wasn't longing to be free from me. That was the problem.

Still, when God first started calling me out in October, I told Kevin, I wasn't asking Him to, so why now? Kev told me I must have seen something...I must have known something to be true...something I knew...even though I didn't know I knew it, allowed me to hear him...WOW...that was absolutely right. I knew I wasn't happy...and I was exhausted from trying to fix that...but I was looking in all the wrong places. For me it was all about self gratification...I was giving myself everything I ever wanted...and hurting everybody in the process...and only becoming more miserable...I was miserable...and I was at my wits end. I had figured out that I could not bring myself happiness...no matter how hard I tried. Deep down I knew this...and I was profoundly sad...and faced with a decision. I knew the way I was living was not good, but I had already tried religion...and I couldn't fit that mold. I was SO tired of me...so tired of empty religion...although I didn't know it, I was finally looking for something else. I didn't have the answers.

This is why God is truly AMAZING to me. That answer was sufficient for me. I didn't ask Him why...I asked Kevin. God loves me SO much though, that He wanted to tell me Himself...so tonight...while I was reading the Bible with my girls, He decided to blow me away with this (I have already read this...I am in Leviticus...another example of the Bible being alive...this verse did not speak to me before...but it jumped off the page at me tonight)

Exodus 3:2-4 2 And the Angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.4 So when the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses! And he said, Here I am.

It says that when the Lord saw that Moses turned aside to look that God called him. Moses had to look first...and then God called to Him. God wasn't sitting in the bush calling Moses out over and over again, hoping to be heard...no...Moses had to look. And Moses didn't know what He was looking for either...it says Moses wanted to see why a bush on fire wasn't being consumed...He wasn't looking for God. Still, I think that the fact that Moses was looking made him vulnerable maybe...more apt to hear. The same with me. I didn't know what I was looking for...but I was looking. Maybe in looking we admit we don't have all the answers...and when we come to that realization, God can show us that He does.

Moses went on to have a BEAUTIFUL relationship with God. Exodus 33:11 says So the LORD spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend...it started with his response to Gods call..."Here I am". No, Moses wasn't perfect...he didn't believe in himself...he doubted God's ability to come through...but he learned through God revealing Himself to him...a little bit at a time...to trust Him. I love that...there is hope for me after all.

Here I am.

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