Tuesday, April 16, 2013

My Soul Laid Bare

On Saturday, I had four deep conversations with four of my best friends. I voiced my concerns, my fears, my shortcomings, admitted my wrongdoings, which led to my ultimate acknowledgment that I had drifted from God and for the past year-and-a-half, I had been living without the direction of God in my life. At the end of the night, I was emotionally drained and I had laid my soul bare before my friends and God.

It took four emotionally taxing conversations with my friends, the last two of which reduced me to a monstrous, crying heap (saying I'm an ugly crier is a HUGE understatement) to completely empty my soul. The beautiful thing about it, though, is that when I had completely emptied myself of all this baggage I had been carrying around and was at my lowest and most vulnerable point, I began to fill the Spirit fill me once again. When I had become empty and had released my soul of everything that ultimately was not God, the Spirit filled me up and replaced all of the junk I had been carrying. After that, my eyes were opened and I began fully comprehending some truths in my life that I had not the courage to admit to myself. With the Spirit's guidance, my eyes were made clear and I could begin to see the path God has laid out for me and recognize certain things in my life that had been hampering my spiritual growth.

That had been my life recently: a year-and-a-half of actions and decisions that didn't glorify God. I had occasional moments where He and I would reconnect and there was some growing being done in arbitrary spurts, but what kind of relationship is that? I was falling deeper and deeper into the barrel until at some point I hit the bottom and you know what, that's where I had been for a long while. Some people think that once you hit the bottom, you start your climb back to the top immediately, but I did some running around the bottom of the barrel looking for my way back to the top in utter spiritual darkness. But that is the beauty of being reduced to nothing, scraping the bottom, looking for a way back up: when you realize you have hit the bottom, you are at your most responsive to God because you recognize you need Him more than ever. Once that has hit you, His love and direction fills you and the beauty of being at the lowest point is realizing all you have to go is up. For the second time in my life, my soul had been laid bare, and I am rediscovering God's purpose, plan, and direction in my life.