I made the happy mistake of challenging the Lord one day. In my anguish, having reached the absolute end of myself, I cried and said, “I’m going to pick a book at random from my bookshelf. I want you to speak to me.”
I had bought this one many years ago but somehow never got to it. Tried reading it once. But it didn’t reeeally speak to me at that time, ykwim?
Unstoppable by Christine Caine. I slid it out from the shelf. Went out to my balcony. It had just started to rain. Heavily. I had just finished preparing some chilly beef (that didn’t turn out great, it was that kind of day). So with my clothes already wet, it didn’t really matter that I sat down on the rain-covered balcony floor. There was a bucket there which I used as a book-umbrella. Didn’t help much but at least the book wasn’t soaked.
Somehow, it didn’t matter. The book would dry. This moment was too deep. I needed Him to speak. And oh, He did.
I had opened up a chapter at random, because the title spoke the most to me out of all the rest. It read ‘Fully Qualified for your Race’. Hah! If there were a polar opposite to that, there was my heart. I felt nothing close to qualified. More like a broken, hurting, cowardly mess.
I had been trying to get over a heartbreak for more than six months. It hurt just to think it took me this long to get over something that hadn’t even happened. I had been carrying so much shame, so much regret and pain. Not just because I couldn’t get over it, but because this was an issue I had faced so many times. I felt so unhealed, so flawed, so unqualified.
And there in the heavy rain, I sat, and wept, and wept, my tears mixing with the raindrops, but my heart being absolutely shaken and ripped by the words I read as God spoke and spoke to my deep. The depths of His Spirit cried out to mine and the God of ages ministered to me so gently and fiercely at the same time. I will never forget it as long as I live.
And God spoke. Straight to my situation. To my brokenness. And brought me back into His affirming smile. That it didn’t matter that I was broken. That He wouldn’t waste anything that I went through, even the most overwhelmingly pointless struggles. He could still use them.
He would still multiply the most meagre of my offerings, as long as I stayed in the race, in the “exchange zone” as the book calls it. He would take my small part and use it to bless generations. Only God’s heart and mine know how each and every single word in that chapter was so relevant to that moment in eternity that had me writhing in sorrow and defeat and shame. But God found me, and He met me with deep, deep love.
This is the God that I love and serve. And I just can’t give up on Him. Because He really, really doesn’t give up on me.
(P.S. So grateful for amazing humans like Christine Caine who play their part in the grand story!)
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