22 June 2013

Strange Interactions With God

Hey Friends,

As the ongoing saga of my journey of health continues, I find myself in a place I've never quite been in before. Iona was wonderful in a way it wasn't last year. Last year I was desperate for God and angry that He seemed to continually ellude me when I called to him. I spent the entirety of that trip wandering the island and yelling out my frustrations and anger and with what I felt was nothing to show for it. This trip was far different. After a few hours of slow hiking in the morning and sitting and reading while looking out at the sea, I found myself completely satisfied. The book that I was reading was speaking to me in tangent with other things I'd found myself reading earlier in the month and what had been on my heart since the trip started: namely, about healing and faith. While I have a very deep faith, it was very clear that I often let my emotions and feelings decide where I stand at any given moment, whereas my faith resides in my will to believe God, regardless of how I feel. It was the right thing for me to read at the right time, and combined with other things that i had been reading on healing lately, as well as the spiritual journey I had been in so far, I felt strongly that this was exactly what I needed to hear and know. I spent the remainder of the trip just sitting around and being restful and content.

The next day however met with a bombardment of physical attacks on my health, and the following day was even worse. Determined to not give in to emotions and feelings, and fighting fiercely against any pain, I spent nearly every waking minute in conversation with God. This ranged everywhere from pleading, to reminding him of what He's said in his word, to reminding me what He's said in his word, reaffirming that I wasn't going to give up, questioning what His purpose was and ultimately just telling him that I wasn't going to stop wrestling with Him on this until either I was healed, or had an answer as to what I was supposed to take from this. The degree of intensity that this prayer has been is far different than any of the other types of prayer I've ever spent with God. Indeed on the outside I've become very serious and distracted. Not to the point where I neglect my duties to the mission or interacting with people, but noticeable enough to my teammates who began asking me if I'm.

Nevertheless, I'm determined to continue in this action to wherever it may lead. While sometimes physical ailments simply happen and that's the way of it, or we need doctors to treat them- and this certainly may be that, I can't help but suspect there's something deeper going on with this. The sudden onset a month before the trip when I previously have had zero health problems is certainly strange, as is the fact that in the last few months I've decided to go to Scotland on a missions trip that will help plant a church like Scum, help guide Scum into a time of church-wide prayer and fasting unlike what it's had before and have decided what God's ministry calling in my life is. Any one of those things is grounds for an attack by the enemy or testing from God, and I remember that before this all started I both felt I was on the verge of a spiritual breakthrough that would culminate in Scotland.

What does this all mean? I haven't a clue. At this moment I'm in complete darkness. But unlike other moments in my life when the darkness has weighed me down and oppressed me, I feel as though I'm moving through this slowly as though it were a huge pit of mud. But somehow I'll make it through the other side. And I certainly won't give up. We might fear no evil when walking through the valley of the shadow of death, but we still must walk through it.

Yours in Christ,

John

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