Dangerous Ground

I sit on my couch, hair still damp from the first trip to the swimming pool this season, and wonder how my life fits into the world around me.

I'm on dangerous ground lately. I've been praying for God to open my eyes to the things He wants me to see and He's done it, with a vengeance.

I want to nibble at this buffet of awareness God has put in my heart, because I'm afraid that if I gorge myself I will lose the taste for it, but I can't.

In the past three weeks I've read John Piper's Don't Waste Your Life, Jen Hatmaker's Interrupted: An Adventure in Relearning the Adventures of Faith, and Noel Brewer Yeatts Awake: Doing a World of Good One Person At A Time. All this from someone who hasn't read a book cover to cover in a couple years.

Last year I wrote a blog confessing that even though I looked shiny and bright on the outside, on the inside, things were dying. Just what you wanted to hear, right? But maybe you've found yourself in the same place. As I sought some sort of cure for this dilemma, the Lord lead me to Philippians 3:10: I make it my aim to know God.

So I did what any Christian of my demographic does. I found a Bible study to do. Let's just say that learning more about God did not do the trick. I think it's like reading recipes for vegetables while eating a bag of Bugles. I might be reading the right stuff but I am not experiencing any of the benefits.

By January I knew I was drifting. I chose the word REVIVE for my One Word Revolution, because I knew that is what I needed. Revival. New life breathed into these dry dusty bones. God has been answering that cry steadily for the past six months.

It's required me to start again, to really analyze my goals, dreams, desires, plans, habits, and commitments...all that Type A stuff..and lay it at His Feet. If He wants to breathe life into it, great. And if it collects dust while He stirs new things in my heart, great.

I just want to be where He wants me, doing what He wants me to do.

And in the middle of it all, I try to figure out where my real life fits into this scene. I sit on the couch, heart pounding while I read a first hand account of the atrocities in Rwanda while listening to my kids bicker in the background.

I read the statistics and effects of living without a clean water source while booking a vacation to Florida and wonder if there's a right or a wrong in this.

I go to the grocery store for a missing ingredient and think about mothers making mud cakes to fill their children's parasite-ridden bellies and wonder how this is all possible on the same planet.

My heart breaks and I can't look away. But what do I do with this? When I figure it out, I'll let you know. In the meantime, I'll continue to pray that God becomes a consuming fire, destroying what I don't need and bringing new life from what's left behind.

I know He's up to something; it feels like dangerous ground. And I can't wait to see where this goes.