What God's been showing me (a little bit of it, anyway)

Boy am I glad it's Thursday afternoon. Not that the week is over, but the more undesirable aspects of it are. Now the focus shifts to printing CtB tomorrow, prepping for the major woods shoot on Saturday, and, well, doing the major woods shoot on Saturday.

As you know if you read Lana's blog, we went yesterday and picked out a beautiful white gold bracelet. We went to JCPenny's first, followed by the mall jewelry stores, Sears, Dillard's, K-Mart, and Kohl's; then went back to Penny's and got practically the first one we had looked at. Oh well, neither of us minded how long it took, if you can imagine that. It was so much fun to take my girl around the mall and Fort Smith while shopping for jewelry for her. She had a ton of fun too.

Now she has something she can wear and show to people when she tells them about me; that's the main reason I got it for her. I have a watch from my future father-in-law that I can show people; now she has a bracelet from her future husband to show off. It's only fair, as I see it. Of course, I guess the fact that I just love buying things for her counts in there somewhere as well.

Thank you again to those who responded to the FtF query in the previous post. As for me, well, I don't know. On the one hand, it feels like FtF was very significant and formative for me; on the other, I feel quite nearly the same as I did going into it.

Of course, I know that (1) it's not about me and it ultimately doesn't matter how it affected me as long as the Lord's Name was lifted up; and (2) if I was there and doing what God called me to do, then it did affect me, maybe in ways that I can't even comprehend.

I don't feel radically different, as if the heavens have opened up and sprawling new avenues of truth have been revealed to me. But on the other hand, the opening heavens and sprawling avenues probably do fit the last several months for me; God has shown me so much and drawn me closer to Him. Hope you don't think that means I've unlocked perfection; on the contrary, I've been reminded of my imperfection and my utter dependence on my Savior. And I still continue to rebel against my God in ways that shame me.

Thanks to two particular works of John Piper (who is by the way a must-read theologian; seek him out and read his stuff), Desiring God and The Pleasures of God, I have been impressed (not in the sense of admiration, but in that of having something pounded into you) by the amazingly simple equation of life: Love for God = Happiness. Or, to put it more properly as Piper does, revising the old Westminister Catechism, "The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever."

What a delightful phrase, "enjoying Him forever". Do we often hear about our need to enjoy God? Sure, we hear quite often about believing in Him, knowing Him, surrendering to Him, even loving Him. But, to enjoy God? I think the Church falls short in expressing that fundamental need that rests in all of us. Our passionate love for God, our enjoyment of Him, is meant to be our fuel, our lifeblood, our thirst that is always satisfied and never quenched.

This is what David meant when he cried out, "Oh God, You are my God. Earnestly I seek You, my soul thirsts for You in a dry and weary land where there is no water." Or as an anonymous Psalmist exclaims, "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for You, oh God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I come and see the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while all day long men continually say to me, 'Where is your God?'"

Feel free to check my quotes as I don't have my Bible right here with me at the moment; those are from the opening verses of Psalms 63 and 42. But when was the last time you felt that passion for God? That longing, that thirst, that desperation? When was the last time your heart cried out as godless people around you mocked the Name of your God?

And how do we get this hunger? That's the more pressing question. If you're like me, you can at best claim to have this passion only at times during your life; and often you wonder where it has gone. I have no answers, other than the ones you hear all the time: Read your Bible, pray, go to church. Whether or not you believe it, those really do help, if you seek God in doing them.

Ask God to give you a heart that longs for Him, and then don't stop there. Get into His Word; seek His face; shut all else out and focus on Him. As you attend church, enter with a mindset of willing obedience. If you do those things, you are already on the right path.

But don't ever stop seeking Him; that is, after all, what you're already doing at this point. Note the biblical promise: "You will seek Me and find Me," God tells us, "if you seek Me with all your heart." There are a lot of promises in the Word, but that is one of the most heartening to me.

Anyways, I don't even know if any of you guys even have any struggles with this, but I do. Lana can tell you that I often write out stuff in e-mails to her that she already understands, just so that I get it more clearly. Not a bad habit, I guess, especially for a writer.

But yeah, that's something God's been revealing to me and bopping me on the head about a lot over the past few months, so I thought I'd share that. I'll try to get more into what He's revealing to me, in future posts. For now, sayonara and please pray for our filming on Saturday.