Journal Entry 45: Thank you, for not just letting me lay down and die.

Jesus, if you’re not in it, I don’t want it.

Journal Entry 45: Thank you, for not just letting me lay down and die.

          God can hit me with a piece of wisdom or loving words or even direct, blunt, truth from just about anywhere. Sometimes I’m listening to a song, maybe I’m watching a show/movie, or I could be reading a book, and God shows up with a message I can’t not see. This time I was listening to an audio book, and there it was, a message that spoke to me in my personal struggles blatantly. “Would it have been better to not let you change, to not let you grow?” Just one sentence, one remark, but it opened my mind up to what God wanted to say to me.

          I’m worth fighting for. Even if it means pain and loss must be my teachers for me to learn the lesson, God will fight for me, my soul, my salvation. Why? For the best reason, because he loves me.

          We, God’s children, are worth fighting for, because he loves us. The battlefield is life, and there will be times we’ll want to lay down and try to give up. Jesus knows what's on the other side of our battles, and he wants us to be there with him at the end of this war. So, yes, he’s fighting for us inside the battle lines where death rampages, sin bloodies the ground like flood waters, and hate/envy are the mortars and machine gun fire. Jesus and our father God loves us, and they fight for us. One of the hardest truths for us is the fact that we may have to suffer along the way, for our own sake, and sometimes for our brothers and sisters under fire.

          God’s love for us is so great, each and every one of us, that God will not let us fall into damn nation without a fight. Problem is, battles come with pain, emotional torment, and only sometimes cheerful victory. God’s fighting for us, but like Jesus himself had to suffer and walk hard roads, so do we. And let me be honest for me and probably most of us, I don't enjoy that part, yet I know it is needed.

          Why was I born under an alcoholic mother that hated me for most of my childhood? Why was my wife born into her, much worse, situation with her sister in South America? I don’t know. I do know that both of us, from very different starting points ended up together, saved by grace with Jesus, and our hearts for God. We may not like all the parts of our journey, we may have scars from our journey, but God knows what we need to bring us to him, to save our eternal souls.

Scars, a difficult journey, was what I was struggling with. Why this, why that, why not this, a list of fights, desires, struggles that felt like I've been through enough already. Where is my joy, Jesus? My life didn't seem to have much of it. Then I was hit with that simple sentence, “Would it have been better to not let you change, to not let you grow?”

I heard those words, and I heard God telling me that without the struggles, without the journey, I wouldn't be me. God put me through those hard times, let me get, or better, earn my scars, to grow me closer to him. Some of the scars are entirely my fault from my own choices. When we go against God we tend to end up in a mess. I have. Some of my scars came from the battles God had me go through, because he knows what I need and what I can handle with him by my side. Some of my struggles and pains weren’t for me or caused by me, but were for others around me.

We, I, want sunny days, easy paths, and for things to just freaking work out more than it does at the very least. Sometimes it’s our fault things don’t work out or that days aren’t more joyful and free. I made choices in my earlier years that weren’t wise. God had not been my first go to. Those choices have rippling effects. Sometimes it’s God’s fault things don’t work out and the day is a hot, hard, road. He does it for our benefit, like strength training, endurance building, it takes working out, struggling, to grow.

Video games have this wonderful thing where you can restart or die and then respawn and try again. On Ark if you die you can respawn back in your base bed or in some random location on the map. Damn convenient that is; when you can die from hunger, thirst, or getting eaten by a dinosaur. Fallout 76, another game Rainy and I play, also allows you to respawn back at your base or locations on the map. Seeing as you can die for any number of reasons on that game, it’s nice to be given what is basically immortality. Oh, how I wish we had this luxury, but our situation is somewhat different.

God has given us immortality. The big difference is that we don’t get to just restart our lives or magically respawn into a new body. This ability, would undoubtedly, cause mass chaos. What we choose, what we do, has real life consequences. On video games you can do whatever you want and rarely care about others. If your kind on Fallout 76, great, but at the end of the day you can do the whole game without anyone. The same goes for Ark, if not a little more grinding and difficulty on your own. Life, real life, doesn’t work that way. What we choose, how we live, the way we treat each other, is important, very important. I say this long run of an example to say that we will go through hard times for others, and that’s ok. I say this to myself, because, I need to hear it.

I would never grow, if God just gave me what I wanted and left my life to easy roads. Give a child what he wants every time he asks, never let him be challenged, never force him to learn and apply himself, and he’ll be child all his life. Protect a child from everything harmful, no painful moments of emotional and physical thorns, and that child will remain a child. There will be no resilience, no strength, no growth within that child. God loves us enough and knows better than to just give us what we want.

          I’ve been struggling lately to remind myself of these words in this article. God knew what I needed. In one sentence he reminded me what was happening. Jesus works on us from the inside outwards. I’m not throwing back a bottle of tequila or worse, because over the battles and long roads God has built within me resilience through him. I’m learning, slowly due to my own thickheadedness, how to lean on Jesus.

Trust that Jesus Loves You.