I cannot easily sum up journeys. Journeys are taken down long roads, and whenever you feel each step so definitively it is hard then to say ” I went from ___ to ___.” If you would like the following to be summed up, I can say “God took me from being under one of Satan’s strongholds to being in a state of release and freedom.” Yet, to attribute God more complete praise, you can read on, unless you can praise him simply by that sentence…but that sentence is inadequate.
The past few months have been a fog. It crept up on me and before I knew it, it had reached gnarly fingers through too many areas of my life. Eddie and I noticed it in our communication. I lost my joy. I grew discouraged and struggled with apathy about certain areas.
And this was all while amazing things were happening in our life. Our support raising is shooting forward, not by our own strength, but by God and we thank him. Eddie stops constantly throughout the day, looks over at me, and says, “Emilie, do you REALIZE what God has done for us? We can trust him more! Look how he provides!” He has become a more dynamic leader in our family, and I’ve also seen the dynamite within in his heart as he turns more and more over to the Lord. I’ve always known that my husband was meant for a radical life, and I am seeing it now before my eyes. So I wondered, Why can’t I feel the joy I thought I’d have, and be just as enthused with faith as I follow him closely?
I’ve also stayed faithful in the Word, in study and prayer within these past months. I’m not going to give much “air time” to this, because I know that many lives can be spent doing a discipline without heart transformation. But, that is exactly what I’m getting at….
My cry in the last few weeks has been, “Lord, I hear your truth and know it deeply, but what’s keeping me from being transformed by it?” Eddie would ask me why, if I’ve been having such “deep” times in the Word in the morning, has my rotten attitude not changed throughout the rest of the day. Good question. What is the stronghold that is keeping me back?
And then the night came. The stronghold was broken. God used my husband’s insight and a friend’s story to bring me to my knees. I felt something break within me! It was whenever I was crying out to God, Eddie and I both on our faces before him on our living room floor…“I don’t know what the stronghold is!! But I don’t have to! I turn it over to you to take care of and ask you for YOUR FREEDOM!” I don’t have to give Satan credit for the havoc he wreaked in me, but I have tasted and known that the Lord is good: it was his power that brought about a freedom in me last week.
Later that night I read in John about how Jesus approached the adulteress, whose life hung in the eager grip of fingers clasped around rocks in the circle about her. After the rocks fell to the ground, redemption was given to her through the words “If they do not condemn you neither do I. Go now, and sin no more.” I write this because I struggle with discouragement. Discouragement in the form of a downward movement: it is the feeling of your heart moving backward-steps through life, farther away from hope. It was a large part of the density of the “fog” I was in. But Jesus’ words were so full of forward movement! He didn’t dwell on the sin, he released her. And he said “Go now,” and gave her a picture of a life of hope, a life of sinlessness if she would draw from his power and not her own.
And so I move forward now, and do not want to dwell on the stronghold that has been in me. Jesus is my Fortress, and there cannot be a stronghold and his Fortress within the same heart. Jesus, take back your ground!
