Just Rest

Stop. Pause. Focus. Slow Down. Listen.  For at least three weeks now, it seems that those words are the directions that I have been given.  Yet, I haven’t truly understood or embraced any of them fully until this moment.

suppose I should have gotten a clue when my student advisor said in our meeting, “I bet you’re the type of person who has it done the moment you receive the instruction.”  It was not a compliment or an insult.  One might think it was actually the former, but it was just further proof that at times I can be overly diligent.  That is…in my mind.  I suppose that is in itself the issue with having a massive vision.  It fuels a faith that at times can be downright foolish. I used to say and I may have even written here before that if it is not foolish it is not faith. Rather, if that was the case, I submit that I erred.  Perhaps it may appear foolish, but not actually be foolish to be faith.  I have made several mistakes by doing what I “felt” the Lord was leading me to do while not realizing my true motive underneath.  Pride led me to that point. Pride would hope to keep me there, but love has released me from that place of foolishness. Love of a Father, a Son, of a Holy One who together have done so much for me and in me that I have no choice but to receive what is being communicated.

I have attempted to build my own design…my own building…my own structure.  However, all along the structure I had been building was on an imbalanced foundation.  I know a thing or two about building on uncertainty.  It seems for years that is what I allowed myself to do. It had done nothing more than produce worry.  I allowed myself to think too much about things that really don’t matter.  I had built so much on sinking sand, but my image prevented me from opening my mouth and asking for help until it was nearly too late.  I chose to avoid family, friends, and at one point, I even stayed home from church.  I leaned to my own understanding.

Structure. Order. Trust.

I used to wonder when I was a child why my mother was always so consumed with worry…yet, we were at church every Sunday. As a child, I could not understand it and now I still don’t understand it.  It is senseless.  Yet, I allowed worry to nearly consume my being too for a moment.  One moment that lasted too long…where have the years gone?

So far, I have learned in my absence from family, my cousin hasn’t drank anything more than water as her choice beverage for at least 10 of the near 13 years since my original departure to AR…that it had been 10 years since I had been in Louisiana, though I’d had an open invitation to witness the beauty that blossomed out of the ashes of a shared past my brother and I experienced.

I realize that I was my worst enemy. I was facing turmoil with my own children because “God forbid” if I showed a flaw in my parenting skills…I was the super single mom who survived physical, mental, and emotional abuse.  My children were expected to fail by default, but flourished by grace…flourished a long while when I prayed regularly…when I sought My Father’s advice in every decision. Something happened and that stopped.  Yet, in His love for me, My Heavenly Father whispers to me even now as I randomly bleed on this page, “Just Rest.”

I’d been the one who always had it together so how was I to know what was required of me when all I had was broken….so I’m learning now how to truly surrender is learning to receive…learning to receive the presence of My Father as just that.  My daddy…my support…my heart…

Random as this might be I am determined to not just get back to my first love in Christ, but to get back to my first agenda.  It was simple.  If one person is changed…if one person is transformed…If one person doesn’t do what I have…If one person realizes how much they matter to God because of my story…I will do it.

So as my Savior did on that fateful day over 2000 years ago, I enter my flesh into a grave that has no power to hold me there…I will rise again.

©2016 Nadia Davis. All Rights Reserved.