Are you one of those people blessed with a splendid imagination?? The kind that can create a storyline out of a piece of used dental floss on the floor?? I am……..and sometimes I just want to slap myself for it.
Oh sure, it’s fun when you were a kid to imagine all kinds of cool stuff like unicorns, or dressing up in a superhero cape (mine was a towel I tied around my neck) with your sword in hand (I used a blue pipe thing I found on the ground) and jump from trees to fight the bad dudes. Back then my fears were made up and not really that scary. I was fighting trolls, the bad people from Scooby Doo and Skeletor for crying out loud.
Enter adult years. Enter bills, kids, responsibilities, multiple businesses and wonderful clients that don’t think it necessary to pay you (sarcasm intended) etc and yes, sometimes really, really bad situations that threaten to take you out. My husband and I are in a situation like that right now and I’m fighting the urge to create a fictional story in which he and I go down with our ship to the bottom of the ocean with a huge Octopus’s tentacles strangling us as we go down.
Is it faith or is it fiction?? Because it would be really easy to default to my fictional roots and imagine all kinds of awful things because our situation looks bleak. It looks like we should just pack a bag and move to a place with no internet or cell phones. Of course that’s my imagination talking, seeing as though I have the inclination to over-dramatize every single facet of my life most of the time. I’m a certified, 100% drama queen.
Am I alone here or are there a few, brave souls out there that will raise your hand with me?? Oh for crying out loud……….why is this such a struggle for us??
I think sometimes we forget. We forget the thousands of times that God has saved us before out of situations like the one we are in and sometimes worse than our current chaos. But then life settles back down and we get cozy again. We kick back in our little recliner, pull our soft, fuzzy blanket up for a little and nap and then BAM, it hits us. “It” always shows up like a sack full of bricks to the face to awaken us from our slumber.
It’s life. It’s the struggle. The chaos, the overwhelming frustration of living on a fallen planet with a vivid imagination living inside of us. We know the way things should be, but they aren’t. There are these inconsistencies and incongruences that just plan make us mad, if we are being honest. What we want is something close to perfection, but it just doesn’t exist here on earth.
Things are messy. And annoying. And stinking frustrating to say the least.
That must have been the way the Sons of Korah felt when they penned Psalm 46:
God is a safe place to hide,
Ready to help when we need Him.
We stand fearless at the cliff-edge of doom,
(Ah yes, the cliff edge of doom. I feel like I’ve been there a few times)
Courageous in sea storm and earthquake,
Before the rush and roar of oceans,
The tremors that shift mountains,
Jacob-wrestling God fights for us,
God-of-Angel-Armies protects us.
River fountains splash joy, cooling God’s city,
This sacred haunt of the Most High.
God lives here, the streets are safe,
God at your service from crack of dawn.
Godless nations rant and rave,
Kings and kingdoms threaten,
But Earth does anything He says.
Jacob-wrestling God fights for us,
God-of-Angel-Armies protects us.
Attention all! See the marvels of GOD!
He plants flowers and trees all over the earth,
Bans war from pole to pole,
Breaks all the weapons across his knee.
“Step out of the traffic!
Take a long, loving look at me, your
High God,
Above politics, above everything.”
And there it is my friends. God is above it all!! Every single thing on this planet. Every single thing in our lives!
We can rest in Him and His perfect character. We don’t have to fictionalize every thing we go through, we can faith it instead!
We can faith it because we know He is in control, even when it looks like chaos.
We can faith it because His reputation precedes Him. He’s never lost a battle.
We can faith it because He is always good.
We can faith it because He loves us more than anything.
We can faith it because His power is immeasurable and His grace knows no bounds!
So, if you are the protagonist in your sad, depressing current episode of whatever fictional drama you have going in your head, just make your exit. Quit the role. Move on and let God write the script. That’s what I’m going to do anyway! Life is short and we don’t have time for wrong roles and fictional stories with bad ends.
