Hello blog! It’s been a while. I’m in one of those seasons where God is doing something interesting in me. I know he’s taking me to new places in my experience of myself, him and life. I want to know him. And yet I resist getting to know him. I want to pursue him. And yet I end up running away from him. I want to surrender. And yet I fight him with every fiber in my being.
God and I wrestle a lot. It’s not a bad thing necessarily, but it’s frustrating at times. I know that I want to surrender to him, his love and his plans for me, and yet I find myself resisting. Or actually not me, the real me, but my flesh is resisting what he is wanting to do. “It’s gonna hurt too much”, my flesh protests. “Look at these last years…it’s only going to get worse”. It’s a lie. I know that now. I know that God wants something good for me. He isn’t done with me. He wants to chip away more of the pride and self-sufficiency that stop me from hearing him and knowing him in deeper and more satisfying ways. I asked him to do that, so he is only answering my prayers. But there are parts of what he is wanting to do with me personally that I have resisted. My ambitions, my desires, my dreams, my claims to fame, my entitlements….that has to die. I know that. I embrace that theoretically, but I end up fighting it in reality. It has to die, and if God then wants to resurrect some of it in his ways, in his timings and Spirit-led ways instead of Torben’s flesh-led ways, that’s his call. To surrender means to give myself completely into the hands of God and truly say: “your will be done no matter what“. It’s where the rubber meets the road. God is patient with me. And he will not stop calling me into more fullness of life with him. He does that with all his children, and unfortunately most of us ignore him or fight him, and don’t get to experience the rest, peace, joy, and freedom that are the wonderful fruits of a life in surrender.
I want that fruit. More than anything else. That’s what he has showed me. So when I am choosing these days to surrender more fully to him, I don’t do it because I have to or because he has forced me to. I do it because that is what I truly want! The real me, the spirit within me where the Spirit of Christ lives, wants God and life in him more than anything else. These past few months the civil war between my fleshly desires and the desires of my spirit has been raging. It’s been ugly. It’s taken a lot of energy to keep going in this place of constant turmoil. But I have a choice to make. And I have made my choice. I choose the Spirit within me. I choose Christ. I choose life. God’s way. So we’ll see how that will be walked out these coming hours, days, months and years. My emotions are dull right now. Not swinging wildly, just dull and quiet. I don’t make the decision to surrender more fully from an emotional high or from an emotional low for that matter. I know the feelings will swing. They’ll come and go. It’s okay. Surrender is a decision I make with my will. And then the emotions will fall in line with the truths I’ve chosen to embrace. It takes a while for the emotions to do that. But that’s okay too
During these past couple of months I have been envying the simple people I know. I often long for their simplicity. The ease they display in their walk with God. “God is good, he is always faithful, and I will always trust him” they ooze. Not from a place of naïvety. This is just who they are and what they believe. I love simplicity, though I rarely experience it. So I will end this – I’m sure – somewhat confusing blog entry with Secret Garden’s beautiful piece of music Ode To Simplicity:
Blessings, Torben
Broken I run to You 