My Soul Yearns...

So I have been having a pretty rough couple of weeks. I could give you all kinds of excuses for why this has been happening and all the things that went wrong in my life. I could lay out all the reasons I have for falling off the path and not doing what I am supposed to do. However, I think that focusing on all my excuses is part of what kept me down for so long. So I am going to ignore listing all of the reasons that I went wrong: I know what they are, and I am working on it. Instead, I am going to focus on how awful / wonderful it is when God decides to grab your attention full force. 

Now, some of you may be thinking "this sounds really familiar, didn't you already do this blog?". The answer is YES. I did go through this a couple of months ago, and because I have a very thick skull and sometimes decide that I know better than God, there is a decent chance that you will be reading something similar to this again in the future until God gets this lesson through my head.

So, long story short, I had a pity party. This wasn't your average 4 or 5 hour party; this was a two-week rave. Yes, I have bipolar disorder, and yes, things did go wrong in my life, but I could have stopped it from getting that bad. Instead, I wallowed in it, and I gave myself permission to stop participating in life. While this may have only been slightly bad for me, I also stopped actively seeking God and that totally wrecked me. I didn't even realize that was what was wrong until I went to church this past Wednesday night. 

I was feeling all sorry for myself, and basically told God that if He couldn't fix my life and help me, then I was going to take over and do it myself. Not surprisingly, He answered that pretty swiftly, and with the force of a tsunami, and He used my pastor to do it. There was nothing vague about this; God directed this thing straight at my heart. The funny part: my pastor prepares his lessons in advance, so that means that God had been preparing this lesson for me for days before I even knew I needed to learn it. That is just another reminder of how all-powerful and all-knowing God truly is. Got to admit, that is awe-inspiring to me. A few of the more pointed notes I took from this lesson are below:

1. A miserable Christian is someone who is hiding/not dealing with their sin. We hide from our sin, and somehow expect everything to turn out okay anyway.
2. Do I come into the house of worship with sin in my life and leave with the same sin in my life?
3. There is something worse than famine of food or water, and that is spiritual famine.
4. If we weren't able to come together in the house of God, to never hear the word of God spoken again, how awful would that be? How much would that affect my life?
5. Do I have an appetite, a hunger, for God's word? Do I take having the Word of God in my life for granted? 
6. Where do I look for my answers to life's problems? The world, myself, or God?
7. When we put our faith and trust in other people or things, destruction will come.

Yeah, ouch. My toes weren't just stepped on, they were also doused with gasoline and lit on fire, then they were run over with an 18-wheeler, and then I am pretty sure they were eaten by piranhas. 

By the time the service was over, I felt totally wrecked and completely wonderful all at the same time. I was absolutely miserable at the idea of how far gone I was, AGAIN, after I just learned this lesson. In the middle of all of my misery, I also felt amazing relief because I realized that the answer was right in front of me. Repent, make God my number one priority again, go to Him in prayer, study my bible, and things would get better. As the pastor was closing out the service with prayer, I spoke one of the more desperate and sorrowful prayers that I ever have, begging God to forgive me and asking Him to take back over. The relief once I did that was so beautiful that is was almost painful. 

I am still working my way back to where I need to be, but it is getting better. All I really need, all I am craving right now, is a long time in prayer and several hours of bible study. This is one addiction I could really enjoy. :)