When you earnestly seek to do what’s right, inside a system you do not recognize as broken, you’re asking to be blindsided. When you implicitly trust leaders who depend on the system for power, image and funds, you’re asking to be betrayed. Not seeing what you need to see, you won’t have a clue what’s going on.
What do you do when you feel angry, impotent and stuck, in a place where evil seems invincible and justice, impossible? Be still? Wait patiently? Psalm 37:7 may seem like a call to “just relax.” Instead it affirms and encourages struggle – struggle to resist taking matters into your own hands, struggle to cooperate with Christ to birth deliverance and life.
Throughout his life, Daniel continued to follow God, regardless who did or did not go with him. You too be blessed with a Daniel heart.
Even a cursory look at all levels of leadership in US churches, denominations, networks and ministries reveals that what should be foundational is often absent. Many leaders do not know how to follow God.
How many women today can testify: The church culture, to which we have given ourselves, has used us and used us to make someone else look good, while profoundly rejecting our personhood, our adulthood, our worth, us.
We’ve thought of blessings as sweet little things. And so we miss the wonder and the weightiness of the blessings of the Lord.
Even though I cannot live out any commitment perfectly, I can set my heart toward it and use my voice to affirm it. And that matters. A lot.
In the very act of seeing what is brown, murky and decidedly unsafe, there’s movement. There’s life. And the light is breaking through.
This is a plea not to suppress anger and grief in such a way that they morph into something malevolent. It’s a call to recognize such malevolence in someone else when it is turned against you. ♥️
It feels wonderful to find yourself waiting in quiet hope and encouraging others to do the same. It feels dreadful to seek the God you thought you knew while hope continues to hide. It feels like a betrayal on God’s part, or a failure on yours, or both.
