There’s no getting around it, this has been a tough week. I’ve really been embracing “Little Kid-me,” the born-again me who is now, I must keep reminding myself, not even yet a month old in worldly time.
LK-me is feeling like I’m having to grow up really fast because of the goings on in the real world, and I’ve actually spent some of this week feeling kind of sad about that. Oddly, I also feel prepared by my worldly life to handle it.
There is a self-centered part of me that had been hoping my spiritual rebirth would provide an opportunity to experience the childhood I didn’t have as a flesh-and-blood human, and part of my spiritual work this week has been coming to terms with the fact that it doesn’t work that way. Or at least in my own case, won’t work that way … and I need to be OK with that.
I cannot be the author of God’s plan. So LK-me has found myself dealing with what seem like a lot of challenges for which I am not yet equipped. I can’t just read through the entire Bible as if it were an HR Newsletter just to have encountered all the words (or the Word) by the time I need the info.
Yet the world is what it is, and LK-me is encountering big issues, like pandemics and economic woes and racism – including the internalized racism in my own heart that needs to be cleansed, like the divisions and infighting among the people of my newly adopted church (mostly over issues of Biblical exegesis vs. social justice action as a focus of teaching and worship) – which I am finding very painful as an introduction to my new church family … but it is what it is … and like dealing with a beloved family member who was born-again decades ago as a teenager but who has fallen away from Christ in sin.
These things are a lot for LK-me who hasn’t even read most of the New Testament yet, and feels ill-equipped to deal with them. And yet, even amidst all that, I do feel a supernatural strength within me, a knowledge that God will guide me and I can trust Him so long as I continue to submit to His will rather than trying to address these issues without Him.
Heavy stuff for a less-than one month old Little Kid. And yet even that is a blessing in its own way. It’s providing a powerful lesson for me in the difference between joy in Christ and worldly happiness. The joy is absolutely always there, even as I struggle through some days when worldly happiness just isn’t.
GodChild 