When you move into a pre-owned home, you also acquire most
of the fixtures installed and left behind by the sellers; not so in a newly
built house. One of the fixtures we had
come to depend on was a mailbox.
Although, we could live forever without “junk” mail and preferred to
ignore the bills that usually arrive daily; we understood that Creditors would
not accept our mailbox deficiency as an appropriate excuse for late
payment. After a trip to Home Depot,
acquiring a beautiful poly mailbox, to match our siding and a hardwood post for
an anchor, Steve grabbed the shovel, confident that we would be ready to receive
mail within an hour. There were a few
facts, however, that we had forgotten to include in our planning. The soil was clay, the month was July, the
temperature was 90 and there had been no rain for several days….Exactly!!! He was trying to dig a hole in a giant,
baked, adobe brick. After a couple days
of digging, filling the “hole” with water, digging, water, digging, water,
digging we were finally ready for the next mail run.
Sunday morning, I heard an awesome sermon entitled, “The
Cost of Forgiveness” by Anthony Garcia. God’s timing is perfect and it was of
course, exactly what I needed to hear. I
heard that still, small voice whisper instructions to my heart and I couldn’t
wait to get home and obey. Someone had
said something on Saturday that cut and on Sunday, I was still hurting. I knew I needed to address the situation,
clean out the wound and stop the bleeding.
After corresponding with the person and making it “right,” I tried to go
to the next step outlined in the sermon; I needed to “Grieve and Leave.”
In his sermon, Anthony talked about acknowledging the hurt,
taking time to grieve over it, then bury it and leave; MOVE ON!!! The first 2 steps were easy!!! I had no problem acknowledging the hurt; the
wound was fresh and raw. The grief seem
to come naturally, I shed a few tears, allowed the anger to spill over,
reasoned it all out, over and over and finally got the shovel out to dig a
hole. I hadn’t counted on the hardness
of the soil. After digging a couple of
minutes, I laid the hurt to rest and smoothed the soil back into place. Monday morning, the hurt had somehow pushed
back to the surface and I realized the hole had to be deeper and it was going
to take a lot more digging, some watering, more digging, watering and
digging. So here I am, on my knees,
softening the soil of my heart with tears; handing the shovel back to God, I
submit to His digging.
Sometimes we go through life enduring the heat of the day
and experiencing a drought in our spirit.
We don’t realize how hard the soil of our heart has become until God
hands us a shovel and says, “It’s time to dig.”
You may encounter some stubborn weeds, a few stones and tangled roots
deep in the ground, left from previous wounds but keep digging. Allow God to soften the soil with your tears,
dig a little more and soon you will have soft, broken ground ready for seeds of
love and forgiveness.
Hosea 10:12 Sow to yourselves in
righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to
seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.
No comments:
Post a Comment