GRACE has brought us to a place of faith and now the task is to
submit to our Lord’s carrying of us. He
will carry us if we let Him. If we go in
our own power, however, He will not be allowed by us to carry us.
The true verbal faith is to be carried; over the cusp of our
fear, through heavy moments, past our lethargy, and under the heinous clouds of
despair. To be carried is to be
assisted.
God carried Israel through the great Exodus, and He attempted to
carry the Israelites in their desert journeying; but they would not submit. Ours, as theirs, however, is to submit. Not that submission is an easy thing.
It’s hard in the flesh, what’s easy to do in the Spirit; for,
nothing is impossible through God.
To submit is to be carried.
Like the woman of eight cancer years; a person carried serenely,
where fear and despair courted, yet wasn’t quite her existential
experience. She experienced a peace transcendent
of her situation and understanding. To
see her smile was to see and know and understand, somehow, that she was carried; by the prayers of the
saints, and by the sublime nature of her faith.
We know something of this experience, to cast every burden and
care into the lap of the Lord. When we’re
pitted against all odds, and nothing can be comprehensively reconciled, and
when rationality is absurd, we have but a
choice of all choices available to a being in eternity. We can still gleefully surrender. When we faced the imminent death of our
infant, Nathanael, we chose not to seek to understand, for, as with cancer,
understanding can never be gleaned. Who
can ever grasp a mystery? Yet, grasping
the mystery, even if that were possible, is to miss the point.
Faith is in not needing to know the answer; to accept the moment
as it is, unfettered and wild as reality is.
Yet, God’s empathy is ever copious. As soon as we give up needing to know, God’s
grace prevails over us like a cool breeze on a warm summer’s day.
Haunting are the situations in life that present as
vacuous. Spiritually, they seem
empty. But they, the extraneous moments,
are verily full of the grace we need.
Every spiritual thing is there, free, and viably accessible.
The key to unlock God’s carrying grace is a humble and gentle
surrender. He who is Grace Personified
will come and furnish us with the grace of faith for whatever we face.
He has so much grace
for us. We only need to be open. And there’s no effort in that. Our efforts only come into being as a barrier to God’s grace. We get in His way, when there’s the
opportunity to get out of His way.
The harder we try to be carried by faith the more elusive grace
will be. But if we let go, God will come
in, and, with the prayers of the saints, He will carry us the entire tumultuous
journey.
Grace carries the afflicted believer through every hellish
passage by faith and prayer.
Unfailing love and power, known as Grace, carries us, if we’ll
let it.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.
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