“If only…” is a phrase that I try to avoid. My usual mental response is, “well, it isn’t.” And I try to focus on what is. I have to do this with our housing situation. Right now we have an apartment/storage unit to use once this house closes. The price is within tolerances of our income, but we wonder if this was really what God was leading us to do. Well, if it wasn’t, we’re here now. And what we do, we do from here. I wonder whether we were truly in the will of my Master. But really the only reason I go there is because I’m afraid of the present and near future.
But there are times when my Master brings to my mind the past decisions and choices, and walks me through the “if only…”’s in order to show me a better direction for the future. It is learning from the past, and it is good, especially when my Master is my Guide through it. But I have to go completely through it. I sometimes get distracted by the past and want to take time to grieve my mistake. A moment will suffice, the future awaits, and this lesson is more important than tears over what cannot be changed. Only the future holds hope, and it only does so because my Master leads me into it. I need to catch up and follow through the past, learning the lesson my Master has for me.
In this reading from MUFHH, Chambers refers to the weeping of Jesus over Jerusalem as He enters. He says if only Jerusalem had known what led to peace. Instead they were to be destroyed. Their future was marked by their current blindness, but this continued blindness is because now it has been “hidden” from their eyes. When I consider that, I shudder. It is possible for me to remain so blinded to my own “strange god” (as Chambers puts it) that I eventually suffer being blinded. It smacks of my suffering with addiction. It is my choice to take that road, but it eventually takes over and I no longer have a choice. I needed no help to get into it, but I need help to get out. This “strange god” works the same way, and could be sneaky enough to fly under my “addiction radar”, missed because I was looking for something else. Yet, addictions are strange gods as well.
So, the type of problem is similar, and my radar can be tuned to catch them. I just, as always, need to allow my Master to work the controls on the radar. It helps me, He doesn’t really need it. He simply uses whatever sensitivity I have to point out what He is ready to change. He wants my compliance with it, inviting me into the process, always respecting my boundaries, but also leaving me with the responsibility for obedience and submission. Once again, I have a responsibility. Again, this responsibility is not to become acceptable, but rather in response to being accepted. In some sense, my responsibility is to remain still and let my Master perform surgery. But in another sense, my responsibility is to witness courageously the revelation of my “strange god” and surrender it.
Again, this is part of the purpose of these entries. I respond to areas of my life which my Master reveals, confess them publicly, and surrender them to my Master before witnesses. In secret I can easily rescue my idol from the altar before it is completely destroyed. In public, it is more difficult. What keeps me from “slight of hand” (distracting with the next entry what I said I would give up in the previous one) is that some of you follow a ways behind, reading and commenting on previous entries a week or more after I wrote them. Now that’s accountability. That’s excellent! It is good for me to go back and re-read older entries, and I need to take some time to review them to ensure I am familiar with where I am supposed to be. But that other do that as well is a layer of accountability I have never had before, and I like it! For some reason, instead of intrusive, it feels freeing and exciting (isn’t that weird?). So, thank you again to whoever finds this page, and reads these words, whenever you read them. Hopefully when that happens, when you catch up with where I am in my journey, you find me struggling with different things, and these “strange gods” just ashes.
Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost For His Highest": April 3rd.
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