From Mount Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines in glorious radiance. --Psalm 50:2
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the beauty of God's creation. I watch perfect white clouds waltzing across a bright blue sky. I marvel at the green of the treetops illuminated by golden sunbeams and the ripple in a lake created by a delicate spring breeze. I listen to birds chirping their love songs and the carefree laughter of children playing outside. I rejoice in the warm, fresh air caressing my skin, and I wonder at God's glorious radiance. The same God who created the spectacular beauty that is our natural world, including such majestic feats as Mt. Zion, knows each of us better than we know ourselves. He keeps creation running smoothly, and yet He also knows the exact number of hairs on each of our heads (Luke 12:7). Just as He commanded all the beauty of creation into existence, He breathed life into each of us (Genesis 2:7). And while the beauty of the world sometimes makes my heart flutter like butterfly wings when I try to take it in, the beauty of the world is only the backdrop for God's masterpiece of humankind. We are the culminating work of His creation, yet since the fall we don't always reflect His glorious radiance the way nature does. Our sin has dimmed our glow, but God offers a cleansing through the blood of His Son. When we have been washed in Christ's blood, God sees us as He made us and intends for us to be rather than in the ugliness of our sin. When we walk with Him, His glorious radiance will illuminate us from our spirits outward, and we will effortlessly find ourselves responding to His command to let our light shine in the world (Matthew 5:16). Like nature, we cannot help but shine when we reflect the radiant image of the One who created us.
I'm exhausted. I'm tired of thinking, and I'm tired of trying. I'm tired of putting forth my personal effort to do good only to see my efforts fall flat. I'm tired of questioning myself when all my exertion seems for naught, and I'm tired of exerting myself to make a difference that I simply cannot make on my own.
Fortunately, there is hope. Hope that hearts have cried out for long before mine and hope that God has promised thousands of years before my generation walked the earth. Hope that the prophet Isaiah proclaimed to my predecessors who battled with their own broken hearts and weary spirits.
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. --Isaiah 40:28-31
I am weary because I've been relying on my own efforts when I should have been calling out for God's supernatural intervention. I am not the only one. In our human frailty, we cannot muster within ourselves the power to do His work well. We grow weary, even in our vigorous youth. God does not grow weary. God has so much strength that He freely lavishes it on the weak, increasing their power and their endurance for life's uphill hike.
Self-pity has no place in a God-empowered heart. The enemy wants us weakened and weary and ineffective. God wants to renew us and strengthen us and increase our potency in a world that desparetly needs potent people to spread the truth. God is the everlasting power source, and He will graciously flood us with His power to further His kingdom without growing weary. We need only to fall to our knees and ask.
I burst into tears on the way home from work today. But that's not unusual. I have cried at least once a week every week since July 25 because I hate my job so much. I'm depressed for several reasons, the smallest of which is the actual work itself. I'm depressed because I go into work each morning feeling nauseous. At least one person is pissed at me before I even walk in the door at 7am each morning. The hostility I face is unreal to me considering that I taught in a private school for two years where I thought I faced all the hostility one person could handle on a daily basis. Little did I know. I'm depressed because I work my ass off every day for people who will turn around and scream at me in front of their friends at graduation. I'm depressed because I just spent my entire savings account not to mention a great deal of time and energy to become qualified for my current job only to learn when I was no longer a sheltered intern that this job would make me miserable no matter what all the career inventories said before I pursued this path. I'm depressed because my husband and I need my salary and I can't quit without anything else lined up. I'm depressed because I'm qualified for nothing else and I don't have the drive to go back to school yet again because I'm so jaded after this experience. I'm depressed because I'm trapped in my personal and daily hell for another year before I can try to change schools and possibly grade levels to see if I can find a less hostile environment in which to use my training. I'm depressed because no matter how much I think about it, I cannot figure out how I got to this low.
When I got home from work today, I turned to food. Not out of hunger, but out of desparation. Desparation stemming from the same sense of entitlement that I fault the people I work with for--thinking I deserve something better than what I've got. Today, in my fit of self-pitying despair, I used food as my idol when I should have fallen to my knees and cried out to the only One who satisfies the longing inside of me for something more. He has made me different, but I continue to act the same. I wallow in self-pity and food is my companion of choice. No matter how much emptier it leaves me when I finish. Yes, God has offered me a way out, but some days I choose not to take it. Yes, I am in fact quite self-destructive and masochistic by nature. Depression is such familiar ground for me that I don't know what I would do if I suddenly felt contentment for more than a few moments.
Someone once said to me, "He won't follow you into the sin, but He'll be there when you come out." Amen. He doesn't want me to fall, but He allows me to fall because of free will. My sin shows ingratitude for all He's done for me, but He forgives me when I return to Him because of His abounding grace and mercy. I don't deserve it. I deserve suffering on top of my suffering. I deserve to be given over to my ways. But God's grace is all about what I don't deserve. There is no excuse for sin, but there is forgiveness and redemption and new hope available in spite of it.
Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits--who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. --Psalm 103:1-5
Memory is a funny thing. Life changes and we move with it, but, barring any mental defect such as amnesia, we cannot completely delete the memory of where we've been. We may try to outrun our past, but it follows us in our aching scars. Or, we may try to pursue our past, not because it is better, but because we want to hide from our anxieties of the different present. And some days our past startles us, leaving us with a dazed "just seen a ghost" expression on our unsuspecting faces.
Do our memories live in us or do we live in our memories? I have walked down many paths. Some windy and overgrown, others straight and clear. I have carried a piece of each path with me, and I have left a piece of myself on each place where I have trod. I have been known to confuse the past and the present, thinking that old friendships on which I used to lean are still there for me or that old habits on which I used to rely for a release will still work. Then I remember that I am not who I was, they are not who they were, and time and life can warp so much that people and things no longer fit together as neatly as they did before.
I don't know if I walk the roads in my mind for learning or longing or comfort or simple nostalgia. I don't know if I choose to walk through the past, or if the past seeks me out and gives me no choice but to remember. I do know that somehow we find each other in song lyrics, old photographs, and too much thinking on a lazy Saturday afternoon.
I also know that the tool of memory is crucial to our spiritual growth and walk with God. While He remembers our sins no more (Jeremiah 31:34), God calls us to remember Him. In Revelation 3:3, we are warned, "Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you." If we are always looking back, we fail to make the most of the present for God's glory. If we never look ahead, we may not remember that He will return and hold us even more accountable than our memories do for everywhere we've been.