The Road to Rest
One day, I found myself to be, well tired. I was tired of the pain from the past that never seemed to leave my soul. The present that I was weary of navigating. A future that I knew was uncertain. My soul was weary. However, I did not know how to rest in God. I had been a Christian for 17 years and knew something in my walk was missing but I did not know what or even how to find it.
I went through several situations that shook me both emotionally and spiritually. I realized that I did not feel worthy in God’s eyes. While I knew I needed God and wanted to make Him an integral part of my life, I simply did not feel He would want someone like me. I was just too broken. I felt the past and present of my life such that God could never truly use me. It would take 15 months of exploring my relationship with God to find that I could not have been more wrong.
My spiritual companion, Rob started our first session with prayer. He asked God to help me feel His presence and to bring to the session what needed to be said. After his prayer, I sat for the longest time, quietly and realizing for the first time, I was indeed in God’s presence. One of the first things Rob taught me to do was to recognize God’s voice. I learned how God speaks to me, His child. I learned what His voice sounded like and how to distinguish this from my own voice, the voice of others and the voice of Satan, the deceiver. He taught me how to discern God’s will for my life. For me, God’s will was associated with what I needed to do, could do and should do. All of which I found difficult, and ultimately self-defeating. So, learning what God’s will for my life was to simply be His child was foreign. I had to learn how to allow myself to take hold of His comfort, peace and joy; to just simply rest in Him. Learning to rest in God, meant that He wanted me to unearth pain, shame and the past which kept me in a constant state of unrest.
In the 15 months of spiritual companionship, I filed for divorce, lost both parents, and watched a beloved family member go into a potentially fatal heart rhythm that was rectified with surgery. With each situation God revealed more of Himself and began to show me who I am in Him. My heart began to learn that I enjoyed being His child and found that spending time with Him, learning how to have a relationship with my Father fulfilling. A peace and comfort came into my life that I had never experienced before. But God was not satisfied with leaving me there.
One night, I asked God, “What do you really think of me?” He walked me through the different areas of my life that I had worked on with Him. He gave me the words, “Courage, commitment, honor and brave”. The feeling of love came over me in such a way that there was no doubt in my mind the immeasurable depth of the love God has for me. This was a pivotal moment in my spiritual walk because my heart understood the depths of His love. Later, I would understand He revealed this to me so that I would understand that I could trust Him with the past that I kept to myself.
He wanted me to give to Him the past that held the most pain and shame. He wanted my heart to know that my pain, shame, feelings of being unworthy were all things that had been taken by His Son on the cross. One night, amid considerable grief, God showed me what I had chosen to carry with me but that I was free to let go. Allowing Him to take this gave me a greater understanding of Jesus’ love for me, that His burden truly is easy and His yoke light. The choice to explore my relationship with my Heavenly Father and to allow Him to heal me has been hard journey but vastly rewarding. By knowing Him, I have begun to know myself, and to know that my weary soul has found rest in Him and Him alone.
@Copyright 2024, The Road to Rest, Evelyn Lee, Author
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