The past sixth months have been a spiritual and emotional rollercoaster for me. This October I thought I'd hit rock bottom. Slowly I recovered and regained my ability to rely on myself, only to wake up in January and feel like my passion for life had simply evaporated. It wasn't that I was unhappy or miserable. I was just apathetic--which for me is a worse state than being angry or upset or depressed because I'm typically so full of zest for life. My twenty-plus years of Christian experience provides a simple recipe for escaping apathy: read the Word and pray. For the better part of the last month though, I've really struggled to do this. I've prayed, but opening my Bible has seemed impossible. It was like there was some sort of imaginary clamp on it that I couldn't bring myself to pry off.
Thankfully, the Lord has wisely surrounded me by the strongest community of believers I've ever known in my life. Sunday, a friend encouraged me (or really gently forced me) to just open my Bible and start reading John. And not simply reading, but READING. As in, absorbing, digesting, listening, rather than glossing over. I quipped that I could recite the entire first chapter of John without reading it, but my friend was insistent and for some reason I listened. Funnily, I didn't make it past the first five verses. Particularly verses four and five I kept reading over and over:
"In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it."
When I finally submitted and started reading my Bible the darkness and apathy that has plagued me for the past month evaporated. It sounds crazy right? You don't just come out of something, but the past few days I feel like I've been renewed in a way that I can't fully describe. And I only am hungering to read the Word more and more. This is the strongest evidence possible to the power and truth and immediacy of my faith. The living, breathing Word of God has the ability to pull me out of wherever I'm at and change me instantaneously.
So whatever you're struggling with, big, small, tangible, evasive, get out a Bible and start reading. John is a good place to begin, but the Word of our Lord does not return void, so wherever you end up you will find that living light that shines in the darkness. You will find the Word that became flesh. You will find the Word through which all things were made. And you will be restored. Sound crazy? Absolutely. Ironically, it only functions to affirm what I know in my heart to be true. Every morning this week I've been reading my Bible and I feel alive again for the first time in a long time.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned..." John 3:16-18a
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