I know how to be brought low and I know how to abound…in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. ~ Philippians 4:12-13
The last part of verse 13 has been our son’s “verse” for the longest time. For the years that he was wrestling, it was the verse my husband prayed with him before he went to the mat. It’s the verses that come before it that speak into my heart. I feel like I’ve been in this cycle for so many, oh my goodness, so many years.
Heaviness, weariness, burdens…so, so much. My response to this has been to count all of that as hunger and need. Now I’m wrestling with the thought of: was it all?
I can get stuck so easily into a habit: good or bad. Carrying my burden like a trophy. Thinking that our financial struggle is a burden. Never thinking that maybe it’s not. Maybe I am living in abundance, but I’m refusing to call it that. Maybe I am living in plenty, but I sit ignoring it because it’s not the plenty that I want.
I want so desperately to wake up in the morning looking at my day as a day filled with abundance because it is a day I know that He is in with me. The longer I ignore and call a goose what is really a duck the further and further I sink away from the world around me. This cloudiness that sits around my head is so much the result of my sin and failure to live here and now…this place and this season with my words and thoughts to His glory instead of my failures. Knowing that although we live not yet where we are meant to be, we still live in the time and place and circumstance that He is in with us.
No matter what time it is we learn to adjust to it on the basis of hope and purpose that GOD IS IN IT. ~ Z. Eswine