The literary community is awash with with them, even the movie industry is full of them, and the television industry, well it is all about the series.  Our life, well we can look at it as a series to.  It is a series of events, good bad or indifferent.  Really a series of years after all.  One after the other they come and go, and sometimes they link together in chunks of time that identify what we were doing and who we were during that time in our life.  For me the last three years can be identified as “the years of Gods Anvil”.  They are the years where God has molded me like none other since I trusted Him 17 years ago.

The previous three years have been a time of trial.  God has used that time to prove to me that He is unchanging, faithful, and worthy of all of me in ways that He could not have before.  He has stripped me of things that were not like Him, begun the process in other areas, and replaced them with the things that make me more like Him.  This part of the series has been painful, a trial of physical kind, a long journey that has brought me through things I never even knew were possible.  But through all of it I have learned things about God that made it worth the trip.

As this year comes to a close, so does this part of the series.  I move on to the next part of the series.  To see what God has in store next for me.  I move on to the part where I see what God does with this incredible passion He has given me.  In any series we read or see, we wait to see what the writer does, we depend on the writer to write the story.  In this case I will depend on God as I move into the next part of the series, the next stage in the process, the next year.  I know that He is unchanging, faithful, and worthy of all that I am.

With all hope and excitement I move the the next part in the series, because what I learned in the last part of the series shows me I have hope and can be excited regardless of what is to come next.  No matter what may come next, and no matter the outcome of what God is doing, it is going to be something that gives Him glory.  He is God and that alone is worthy of praise.

It arrived in the mail, my new drivers license.  The trophy is here, the thing that I waited for, the thing that shows I made it to the end of the tunnel I was in for so long.  The trophy that shows me that I am on to the next new journey, the next stage in the molding process.  In other ways it won’t end because I am never going to be the same person I was when it started, I never can be because I have been changed and molded on His Anvil into something new and better.  I see things in a different perspective, in ways I had not thought of, in ways I had not dreamed of.  I imagine my life different now then I had three years ago.  I have a passion for something completely different then I had three years ago.

God does amazing things when we lay on His anvil.  He molds us and changes us in ways we never would have imagined for ourselves.  This is because our ways are our not like His ways.  We can never fathom His ways.  We can never fathom what He might do next with us.  I now have that trophy in hand, but cannot fathom what He might do to me next, what He might do in this stage of the molding process.  But I do know that it is beyond what I would fathom, and way better then that which I would choose for myself.  So here I sit, putting myself on His Anvil, waiting for what He will do.  I pray I will continue to be moldable, and that I will continue to listen to what He has for me rather then what I desire for myself.

When we are transparent to others, an open book, share it all, we do so because our hearts tell us to do so.  This does not mean the same will be done in return.  Sometimes it even means we will be hurt.  Our motivation for doing this will determine whether we withhold our affection from others once we are hurt by someone who holds back their heart from us after we have laid our hearts open to them.

 

If we are doing this because we love, because we know that God can use our experience and what we have been through, and what He has done, we will continue laying our book open to others.  If our motivation is superficial or self serving the hurt will often stop us from opening our book again.  It is interesting to me to see what Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:11-13 about the fact that they were opening their hearts to them, the Corinthians, but not receiving the same in return.  Doesn’t God do this for man?  Despite how, or even whether we do the same in return!

 

This began when God opened a way by sending Christ, by keeping the book open, not closing the pages or ending the story because we were not loving in return.  Christ being born in a manger is the ultimate example of 2 Cor 6:11-13, God not withholding affection from us.

Trophy day #1 didn’t go so well.  However God was still firm, and my husband was still standing in the same place he always was through this whole 3 year journey I have been on.  So off we went yesterday to trophy day #2, and I accomplished what I had set out to the day before.  I got my trophy, my drivers license.  After 2 years of not driving, and a 3 year medical journey, I got my trophy, which in my mind somehow signals a victory.

Interesting thing however, I cried when I didn’t get it, which I knew I would.  But the more I think about it the more I realize it it wasn’t the “trophy” I was upset about not getting the first day.  Now that I have it, I realize what it means.  I am not jumping in the car today to go drive, I am not itching to drive all over, go places I couldn’t go before.  What I want to do is tell everyone “see it ended, I MADE IT THROUGH!”

God was faithful to get me through to the end, to hold me up, to give me all that I needed to see me through to the very very end.  Even on trophy day 1 when I didn’t get my prize, He was faithful to what He had promised by giving me all that I needed.  Not necessarily what I wanted mind you, but what I needed.  That in itself is a reminder of a lesson learned-Not what I wanted, but what I needed.

This isn’t a long post.  A simple short to the point post.  After a long medical journey today is trophy day.  The day I get my drivers license back.  The day I see as the end of this long tunnel that the Lord has brought me through while keeping many amazing promises to me.  Where He has taught me more about Himself then in any other time while I have been walking with Him.  Now to give Him my everything by showing to others what He can do for them.  The trophy is only a personal thing, something I have dubbed it, nothing spiritual really, but something that I can see as an “end” to something huge in my life, but a beginning to something new.

Written Sunday December 14th 2008

Wronged, hurt, crying.  More then just a surface blow.  Something that rocked me, makes me question why I trusted.  Then no apology.  Forgiveness does not depend on an apology, though I want one and wait for one.  That is something I have been doing the past several days.

Years ago God taught me how to forgive when no apology was given or ever likely to come.  It was a hard lesson to learn.  So what makes this time different?  The previous lessons dealt with past hurts and non believers.  Now I need to apply that same lesson to a new deep hurt that was put there by a believer.  Applying that same lesson becomes difficult because somehow I expect more from another believer. I forget that just like I can mess up, they can to.  When they do just because they won’t apologize does not mean I am not obligated to forgive them.  If the apology never comes some of the hurt may always sit there, waiting to heal, but forgiveness does not depend on that.

If I do not apply the lesson God taught me years ago to this situation now, I will be creating a new mud puddle in my life.  The hurt will only be bigger if I refuse to forgive waiting on an apology that may never come.   Waiting on another person to apologize is foolishness when we know forgiving them will help the Son heal the hurt.  I need to allow the Son to heal this new mud puddle in order to move on–apology or not.  So forgive is what I do.

Mud puddles are very messy things.  They come in all shapes, sizes, depths.  Kids love to walk in them, spread the mud, use their shoes as stamp patterns to make marks on the ground, and just splash it.  Then the sun comes out and dries up the mud.  Until it rains again, a little rain makes mud a little messy, a lot of rain makes a mud a lot messy.  How it rains and where it rains even makes a different puddle get more muddy than another.

Mud is like the messy stuff in our past and the puddles the places it happened.  As we reveal these mud puddles to the Son, Christ, they become dried, healed.  If we cover them from the Son He can not heal them.  I have a lot of mud puddles in my past.  Years ago I let The Son heal a lot of mud in my life, revealed a lot of puddles.  It was not an easy process.  It took a lot of prayer, a lot of forgiveness, and a lot of pounding by God.  I look back on those dried puddles as Gods work in my life, and His power.  Problem is it still rains, and when it does the puddles get wet.  When puddles get wet what happens, mud.  With these kinds of puddles what happens is our past makes us either react in a way we don’t like, behave in a way we thought we never would again, have an attitude we thought we changed, and so on.  Well, we are people with a sinful nature.  We are going to sin, we will never be a perfect people on earth.  That includes me, I admit it, I mess up.  Unfortunately we tend to mess up the same way over and over again.

One of the hardest things to do is explain this to others who cannot understand the kinds of puddles you have and what those puddles do to you.  It is difficult to help another person see how our mud puddles splatter our lives now, especially when it rains, if their mud puddles are so different then ours.  Even to help them understand what kind of rain effects our mud puddles the most can be a challenge!  When another person decides that there is mud you haven’t revealed to the Son because they cannot understand the mud you have it hurts, especially when you know that is not the case.  Then they develop a false assumption.  The false assumption hurts badly, but not what hurts the most.  It is the stirring of the mud by the other person because they insisted they could not see it all.  Even if there was more mud to be revealed, revealing it to them would not heal it.

So now what is happening?  It is raining.  What happens when it rains?  The old puddles get wet again.  Now I go to God to restore the old puddles again, because they are wet.  I can only pray that the person who insisted they try and uncover a mud puddle that didnt exist, would realize only God can dry the mud puddles in our lives, and only He is responsible for molding me.  I pray that God will once again dry the mud, help me to remain on His anvil, and mold me as He always does.

Consider a cactus.  It has spikes.  Does it spike you on purpose, does it move its spikes?  No.  But if you get too close to it-OUCH!  Sometimes we have spikes that sit in us, and if someone gets too close-OUCH!  We don’t poke them on purpose, we don’t attack them with our spikes, but it still hurts any how.

Now guess what.  Satan knows where those spikes lie in us, and He uses them against us.  Today was one of those days for me.  Satan especially likes to do that to us when we are doing what He does not like us to be doing–that which God wants us to be doing.  Today God used those spikes in me to hurt others in my life I care about very much.   I did not intend to do so, but it happened.  Not because I set out to spike them, but because situations had set themselves on just the right path that the spikes were set up so that they could poke them if the angle was just right.  And sure enough it was.

My response to what happens is what tells me about my relationship with God.  In the end do I go pull out the spikes and apologize that the spikes poked them, even though it was unintentional, or do I bring out more spikes to defend myself against the counter attack?  Which I choose to do shows how much I trust God to do His part with the other party, and their end of what might have gone wrong.   Sure It was difficult, painful, and even dare I say humbling, but in the end I went and pulled out my spikes by apologizing that they inflicted harm.  I can only pray that God will restore what was lost when they were released.

Last week I was in the hospital for one day having “hardware removal”.  Sounds strange until you know my medical history, including the fact that I have titanium pins and screws in my head.  One of these pins and two screws were removed because they were coming loose.  This was causing pain of course, and they were removed with the hope that the pain across the right side of my head would go away.  I won’t know the outcome of this until the staples are removed.

It is interesting, when we are in pain, what we are willing to go through to have it go away. At times the means of getting rid of the initial pain are worse then the inital pain itself.  Going in the operating room, and walking around with staples in my head is not easy task, however in the end it should be worth it if the pain caused by the loose screw goes away!

With God there have been times in my life when He was trying to strip something from my life because it didn’t reflect Him that seemed terribly painful at the time, but in the end turned out to be well worth the result!  These can be superficial things, emotional attachments, all sorts of things.  One thing that he had to take from me to bring me to where I am today was the pride I held in the accomplishments in my career.  My job was a trophy to me.  The job itself was not the issue, it was the status I placed on it, the position I gave it in my life.  God tells us to put nothing before Him.  I was doing that.  I was finding my joy in something other then Him.  I could not do that on a long term basis and continue running the race He laid out for me without crumbling.

Having God place me on His anvil and strip that pride from my heart was painful.  I did not want to admit it, to show God that I was wrong, to admit that though I knew I was suppose to put Him first I was not always doing that.  In the end when I finally did, something amazing happened.  I began to find a joy that could only come from having a solid relationship with Chirst that was consistent, and from having put Him first always.  It is not an easy task to have Chirst mold us on His Anvil sometimes.  The Anvil has been painful at times, especially when God has reached into the depths of who I have identified myself as.  However, the results have always been well worth it!

Originally written Nov. 11 2008

I have been stripped of the life I thought I wanted.  Planted in a place I always thought I never wanted to live–well, even said to God “except there!”.  I am in a church that is nothing like the one I would choose for myself.  Yet I still find myself full of a joy that comes from this passion God has placed in me.  Knowing God trusts me enough to use me, that He wants me as part of something in His plan gives me a joy that is greater than that which I felt in the plans I had for me.  Greater then what I could have imagined.  Though I sit here uncertain again of my physical state, it matters not, because I know the Lord is going to take care of me whatever comes.  What I am amazed by is the fact that this path has brought me to a place where I feel such joy in Him regardless of what might come.  No more dwelling on the “might and maybe and what ifs”