I have struggled with God’s timing versus my timing for as long as I can remember. It has been an area that I have been tormented about.   I have had tormenting dreams and mental battles about this for as long as I can remember. As I age, I have heard each new wrinkle taunting me…”You’re not getting any younger,”  and reminding me of each disappointment in life…until now!  Hello revelation of Jesus in this area!!

Recently I heard Him speak to me loud and clear and I hope that in sharing this, you will also hear Him, so your years will be full.

I have been walking with God for 23 years. When I started my journey, every gifting I had been given seemed to be fully alive and fully active. I knew instantly what I was called to do and I was on a fast track to get there…that was until all of the interruptions of my life happened. (You can read my story under about Mel on my home page.)  Years of sickness, hospitalizations, the death of our daughter, and destitution in many areas of my life felt like complete derailment. My story was not how I envisioned my life and I spent a lot of my days in the boxing ring with Strife to make things happen in one corner and his opponent, Peace and waiting on God to move, in the other.  I stopped telling anyone about my struggle because I knew I would get another, ‘pep talk’.  I swore if another Christian (though well-meaning) told me the stinking story of the guy who rejected God’s help while trapped on his roof during a flood story, I seriously might have punched them.  I knew myself and I was not unwilling to work hard, unwilling to step out in faith, unwilling to trust Him, unwilling to go against the grain, and a whole slew of other things.  I knew me and I knew Him and I just couldn’t understand where the disconnect was.

I was like Tom Hanks in Castaway, without the ball…no wonder I always loved that movie… Anyway, you get the picture, I felt isolated and rejected and derailed and stuck. I  watched people rise and fall in their callings and I gloriously played spectator and cheerleader to them all and wondered what was wrong with me. Like Hannah in 1 Samuel 1 who had to share her life with the other woman…I’ve had to listen to my share of Peninnahs’ provoke me severely over the years.  It would make me miserable.  I couldn’t understand how the Lord had told them, “Yes”, and me, “Not right now”, again and again.  I really understood the turmoil that Hannah must have felt.  Even though she heard, “not right now”, she was given a double portion of His love and because of wrong thinking and wrong understanding, she was convinced His love was not enough.  She knew that it was supposed to be enough, and just couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t…now that was ambivalence.  What she didn’t understand was that He was prodding her on in her faith to believe for more, she just didn’t understand the process she was in.  Her destination was firm, it was her journey that was the mystery.

I saw this picture in my head, similar to the one I found and posted, and with it I heard Him say to my heart,

“We are taking the back roads.”

Being from rural Missouri, that speaks to this girl.  In one fell swoop I understood what the last 23 years had been about.  I understood and was grateful.  I could breathe again.  You know the long deep breath.  In and out.

The way the journey looks doesn’t change the destination.  But man is perception everything.  There is this scripture that says that His goodness leads us to repentance.  What that means is that when you see just how good He is, you change your mind about who He is.  In one instant, I changed my mind about His love for me, in this area.  I was able to see the last 23 years as His way of loving on me, not rejecting me.  His way of honoring who I was and not forcing me to be someone I was not.  His way of allowing me to go through the hard stuff that needed to be gone through without a fuss or extra drama.  Like picking the petals of a daisy, I now say, “He loves me.  He loves me.  He really, really loves me.”   It’s not that I didn’t have a revelation of His love, because I did, but in this area I was blinded.

The last 23 years for me were about taking the back roads and all along I thought I was the invisible lady in the city…

This revelation has produced rest in me.  It has quieted my heart and opened my mind to a different way of thinking about my life and it has blown a fresh breeze of love my way.

I now see…and for me that makes all the difference.

Are you on the back roads?  Time to see…time to understand…time to rest…time to believe…time to breathe.

Mel