I Want the Finish Line, I’m Tired of the Process

One of the greatest challenges I face daily in my faith journey is the lack of a raw representation of how difficult it can be to follow Christ. It is the most rewarding and fulfilling journey, don’t get me wrong. But it is the lack of real conversations around the daily death of the will of self and how being in this world, and choosing to live a life that sees beyond what it has to offer, is hard. 

Part of why 20,000 words came to be is not to scare us away from the gospel but to bring comfort and clarity that seasons exist for us Christians, too. Seasons to sow and to reap. Seasons to gain and to lose. And while we are in the valley, we can stand in our faith without wavering because we have an understanding of the kind of God that is with us and for us.

If I am being honest, for the very first time in my life, I was not looking forward to another year. It felt like God had abandoned me in the valley way too long, or He had just been going through this path of testing me over and over again. I know, I can sound ridiculous at times, but that had been my truth. And at some point i started attaching my valley moments to my actions. Maybe I have not been praying hard enough. Maybe I need to start breaking some generational curses. Maybe I am not forgiven. Maybe I am being punished…I critically started looking at my life, my past, the number of times I fell short, and now God is punishing me and using this situation to test me again. I was exhausted in my faith. 

Psalms 145:8, The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.

That is the Lord we serve. He has not been trying to punish me. He has not been angry at me. Why would He be, when my debt was paid at the cross? Is it not remarkable how our minds immediately default to attributing our earthly identity to God when things around us do not seem to go the way we had hoped? The way we planned? It is still very hard to try and surrender it all to Him and trust in Him over my own ideas and expectations. Because living in a world that is led by human beings—a faulty world—with faulty expectations of what ‘doing well’ looks like, it is easy to want to take our lives into our own hands. It is easy to believe that our actions guarantee what we hope for.

The Lord's burden is light. He is calling unto us who are tired and heavily burdened. Because He is gentle and humble in heart, and He can give us rest and peace as we grow and navigate life in a broken world. He can renew our strength. That is the Character of God. So if you’re reading this and you feel like you have been stuck in the valley too long, remember, as my pastor once put it, Real Faith is formed in the Valley Moments and not the Mountain Tops. So be encouraged.