Walls

I don't even know where to begin. God has been so good to me. He's been working on my heart and continued the journey I began at the beginning of the year when I said, "Here I am, Lord. Send me." There’s so much to say, I won’t have room to say it all, nor the ability to give the words power but hopefully God will take my inadequacy and make this into something beautiful.
I’ve been re-reading the shack lately. The part of it that has been burned into my memory and my heart is how independent we are as a culture. It’s how we live, and yet, God is calling us to give that up, make him our focus, grow in a relationship with him, and become totally dependent on him. That’s what I long to do, become totally dependent on my Abba, making him the center of my life. However, I have a little thing called fear barring the way, it was the wall around my heart.
It’s with this longing in my heart that I set out for akouo this past weekend. I was expecting God to work and do something, I always do, but I wasn’t expecting that something to hit me so hard. Everything I had on my heart, it’s exactly what akouo was about. It’s exactly what I needed, it was so cool and really powerful. However, the weekend as a whole is not what stands imprinted on my mind and my heart, it was our last evening there.
We split off into just our youth groups and had a time to reflect on the weekend and Praise our Father. The worship was intense, I loved it. After a couple of songs people started confessing things that they had on their hearts, mainly about walls they’d been building, how fake they’d been living, and asking for forgiveness. It hit kinda close, because I had my own walls, fear mainly, that I’d been building and then hiding behind for so long. I felt tears come to my eyes and the spirit nudge me confess myself, but I was scared so I pushed the tears back and ignored the spirit. Then Bobby started talking and began his confession. God used him to get me. Bobby’s was so heartfelt that he was crying pretty heavily near the beginning and all the way through. I can’t stand it when people cry, it makes me tear up too. That didn’t help me any, by way of keeping back my tears, my emotions, and my confession anyway. Then on top of that Bobby also was talking about walls he’d been building. (We’ve talked so he knew of my fear, my walls.) Under the umbrella of the walls he was listing different examples of things we “might” have as walls that we just needed to give to God. “Just let it go”, he said. One particular example he said right as he looked and pointed at me. …the fear of what people think…then our eyes met and I just lost it. I couldn’t hold in the tears and emotions any longer. I don’t think there was a person in there with dry eyes. We cried, and prayed, and tried to sing through the tears for probably an hour or more. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. So, with a tear stained face and many more falling, I choked out my confession of how, for too long, I too had been building up my own walls. I’d been hiding behind my fear and I was tired of living that way. It’s not what I was made for. I asked for forgiveness and received showers of hugs and love. At that moment, I felt the last of my carefully laid walls of fear crumble to dust and blow apart…as far as the east is from the west. An unexplainable peace and joy fell over me and I felt whole, complete for the first time in a long time. My fear and my walls were gone.
Cool right? But God wasn’t done there. When I got home Sunday afternoon, I went upstairs and was laying on my bed when a song came on the radio. It’s one I know all the lyrics to and I love the beat, but it had never registered in my head nor my heart exactly what the words were saying, nor that the speaker in the song was not me, but my Abba. These are the words that I heard:
Come on, it's me you're talking to
There's something going on inside of you
Don't have to say it, but I wish you would
Cause it would be much easier

You always hide behind yourself
You walk a lonely road with no one's help
I hate to break the news
You're headed for a fall

Chorus: And if I have to jump
Then I'll jump And I won't look down
You can cry, you can fight, we can scream and shout
I'll push and pull Until your walls come down
And you understand I'm gonna be around
I'm sticking with you

Even if you try and shut me out
I'm staying here cause that's what love's about
I might let you down, but I won't let you go

So lean into me, I want to know
Everything about the fear you hold inside
Cause you and I are better than just one, so

Chorus:

If that's what it means to love you
If that's what it means to have your back
If that's what it takes to show you
Then I'm in, I'm in


As I laid there on my bed, tears flowing freely down my face I felt the last of my walls fall down, walls I didn’t even know were there and I was filled with an overflowing love that comes only from the Father.
My chains of fear are gone…I’ve been set free.
We serve a good God don’t we?!