Surrender is an Intersection

There comes a point in every widow’s life when she must surrender her sense of identity so that who she was and what she did is stripped clean.  The time for that to happen is different in each widow’s life and no one can tell her exactly when that time is.  It’s a time that she arrives at through the wooing of the Holy Spirit.

I came to that point and am finding it to be the only way to be utterly at peace with exactly where I am now at this very moment.  I have to let God do His growth work in me so that the identity that I allow to fall away can be transformed from who I was to who I am created to be at this very time and this very moment in my life.

Is it easy to get to this point?  No. Definitely not.  I fought against it and struggled with it for long time.  In fact, I embraced the struggle wholeheartedly for it was only as I embraced it that I could totally process through it.  But, at the end of the struggle I found it necessary to come to that place of surrender in order to  begin moving towards the “new me”. Coming to that place of surrender doesn’t mean that the struggle is completely finished.  It’s not.

I find it to be sometimes a daily battle because this is not the life that I pictured – EVER.  Somehow I had it in my mind that my husband and I were going to live forever sitting together in our rockers on the front porch rocking until Jesus comes. Where do I find out who I am created to be?  There is only one place and that is the Bible.  My friendship with the Bible can take me from who I was as the wife of Bob Feathers to the woman God intended for me to be now as a widow.

My being in this place didn’t surprise God.  He knew before I was born that I would be here and He made preparations for me ahead of time to help me through the anticipatory grief, the initial shock on the day my husband died, all those feelings of betrayal, the months and months of questioning “WHY?!” and “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!”, the realization that I needed help to process through my grief, the courage to ask for that help………….so many things that I have experienced and continue to experience. Finding out who I am to be now begins with an act of obedience to simply read or listen to the Bible every day.  Only God’s Word can reveal to me who I really am and illuminate the path that God has created for me to walk. The journey ahead is far more important than the past left behind.

Daily Laying Down My Will

One of the very things that I as a widow struggle with is the daily laying down of my will.  My mind stays wrapped up in what happened that I didn’t want to happen and what may happen in the future. This morning I was reading in the book HINDS FEET ON HIGH PLACES  and this is what it said about that very subject:

“As Christians we know, in theory at least, that in the life of a child of God there are no second causes, that even the most unjust and cruel things, as well as all seemingly pointless and undeserved sufferings, have been permitted by God as glorious opportunities for us to react to them in such a way that our Lord and Savior is able to produce in us, little by little, His own lovely character.

But the High Places of victory and union with Christ cannot be reached by any mental reckoning of self to be dead to sin, or by seeking to devise some way or discipline by which the will can be crucified.  The only way is by learning to accept, day by day, the actual conditions and tests permitted by God, by a continually repeated laying down of our own will and acceptance of His as it is presented to us in the form of the people with whom we have to live and work, and in the things which happen to us.  Every acceptance of His will becomes an altar of sacrifice, and every such surrender and abandonment of ourselves to His will is a means of furthering us on the way to the High Places to which He desires to bring every child of His while they are still living on earth.

The lessons of accepting and triumphing over evil, of becoming acquainted with grief, and pain, and, ultimately, of finding them transformed into something incomparably precious; of learning through constant glad surrender to know the Lord of Love Himself in a a new way and to experience unbroken union with Him–these are the lessons of the allegory in the book.

The High Places and the hinds’ feet do not refer to heavenly places after death, but are meant to be the glorious experience of God’s children here and now–if they will follow the path He choose for them. The experiences through which we are passing are all part of the wonderful process by which the Lord is making real in our lives the same experience which made David and Habakkuk cry out exultantly, ‘The Lord God maketh my feet like hinds’ feet, and setteth me upon mine High Places’ (Ps. 18:33 and Hab. 3:19)”

Darien B. Cooper/Hannah Hurnard HINDS’ FEET ON HIGH PLACES DEVOTIONAL