Around
this time, I began to see a new counselor, Dr. Rosenbaum. I saw him for
close to 4 years. He was very instrumental in saving my life. He saw me
through the worst of times and he encouraged me with the Word of God and fed my
spirit with love and caring. He led me through my journey with great
wisdom and understanding and I came to trust him more than I had ever trusted
anyone. One of the things I loved best about him was that he would really
take time to read and look at my journals and ask questions about them to make
sure he understood what I was trying to say. Most of the time I wrote
poems as riddles or created pictures as a puzzle instead of just coming out and
saying what was going on. He was really good at solving the riddles,
rhymes, and puzzles which allowed me to communicate with him in a way that made
me feel safe and accepted. I think back to all I put that man through and
I am amazed that he stuck with me for so long.
This
is one of the first journals that I shared with him.
A reflection on what was going
wrong with the fast.
On Fasting 8/18/02
Tomorrow
starts my sixth week of this fast. While I haven't been the most
successful faster in the world, I have given it my almost best effort. I
say that I know that God will honor my fast but with greater conviction I must
state that I know for sure that He will not honor every day of the fast.
It is on those days that I try not to make my focus my future but rather the
days that I truly sacrificed and feel as if I have suffered, which up to this
point is what I believed that a fast was all about, that I try to further my
future focus. Somewhere in my heart is floating around the real
reasons why I began this fast but yet elsewhere in my head is floating the
reasons that I am staying on the fast, and as far as my eyes can
tell, the floating is some what storm tossed and battered a bit by
the wind. A fog is setting in and through the fog I hear the call of the
great fog horn that would direct my path but yet the thickness of the
coming fog makes it hard to tell which direction to turn. I turn to
the left and I think that I hear it, the sound of sense and
awareness, but then my flesh rises up in the way of the sound-waves
and my hearing is majorly impaired. It isn't as much of a
spiritual problem caused by this impairment as much as it is becoming a
mental/emotional problem brought on by this sudden coverage of fog. Oh to
know the direction once again and to have a clear view of the horizon.
Think back
to the last time you were in a place with fog heavy enough to silence the
world around you. Are you there, can you see where you are going, and are
you just as amazed as I am that everything looks and even feels
different? It is the same way with snow except that where I live there is
never really enough snow to alter the eyes view. With fog, there is
a sense of aloneness and a lost-ness that quickly comes. Like a
scene from a movie where two lovers are lost in the darkness trying
to find each other in the grayness of the fog, so is my heart and
my mind trying to reconnect with the one purpose and goal of pleasing my
God in the buffeting of my body. There are deep rooted places,
like a ridge that you have approached and found yourself on the edge of
only after a small glimpse of the landscape is seen through the
shimmering breaks in the fog. The ridge is there and there is no way
across and the fog is even thicker down below, so much so that you can't see
the bottom, and your only choice is to sit and wait. Wait for the
fog to lift of for the courage to arrive somewhere within you to just go for it
and make it across the ridge. Once across you know that the ridge will
forever be behind you, but it is that newness of the job of exploration of decision,
not even the crossing, but just the deciding to do it, that can paralyze
you. At first it may seem that it is the fog that is stopping you, but at
a greater look it turns out to be the ridge and what is inside the crevices
that keeps you frozen in one spot. Due to the fog you can never be sure what
may jump out and get you, or just where you will land. The only
movement is that which you already know to do, so you repeat it and repeat it
and repeat it no matter the possible detriment to yourself, but what else
is there to do?
The Lie: That I was being separated from
God and that I couldn't see Him or remember what He had done for me in the past
and that soon He would just go away because I felt like I was wondering around
and stumbling through a fog.
The Truth: God was there with me the whole
time. While we may not see God, God sees us. God does not leave
us, He always pursues us, He wants to be with us.
God always
pursues us in love. Nothing can ever extinguish the flame in God’s heart that
burns to be in personal relationship with us — even when we mess up and get
terribly lost. When God asks us where we are, it is as if God is saying to you
and me, “Where are you? I miss you. My heart aches for you. I want to reconnect
intimately with you. I grieve over the distance between us. I long for your
companionship, and I will search for you until I find you.”
- Trevor
Hudson
Questions
God Asks Us
Psalm 118:1 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.
In Psalms 107 we
are reminded to remember the times that God has delivered us up out of the fog
that we are in where we feel we cannot find or remember what God has done for
us.
Psalm 107: 1-9
1 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is
good;
his
love endures forever.
those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,
3 those he gathered from the lands,
from east and west, from north and south.
4 Some wandered in desert wastelands,
finding no way to a city where they could settle.
5 They were hungry and thirsty,
and their lives ebbed away.
6 Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
7 He led them by a straight way
to a city where they could settle.
8 Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
9 for he satisfies the thirsty
and fills the hungry with good things
