Original Published Date: February 16, 2018
Dear Weary Soul,
Stop and breathe. This world doesn’t want you to know there is a place of rest and peace. It wants you to keep striving and beating your self up for every flaw and weakness. It wants you to cover up all your sin and mistakes and vulnerable places with success and pretty eyelashes and clean eating and bible studies completed. It wants you to never stop trying and working and pushing because you just know deep down- you aren’t enough. You don’t get it right and you’ll never measure up.
Take a big deep breath. Inhale all that oxygen and then let it out. Notice how good it feels to take it in and fill up and slow down. Because just like the air around you doesn’t ask you to be enough for it to offer itself to your needy lungs, God’s grace isn’t holding back from your needy soul until you impress Him. His creation offers so many metaphors for us to see who He is and who we are. But so often we flip the script and try to fill His role- provider, controller, perfector, sufficient- and then we wonder why we are so incredibly tired….
There is some really good news, sweet sisters. God is not waiting for you to do great things for Him. He wants you to keep remembering the great things He has done for you! His love is not based on how hard you work or how right you get it any more than the oxygen asks how well you have cared for your lungs before it fills them! His love and grace is always free flowing and present, if we just quit holding our breathe and let it in.
All the performing and striving and work has been accomplished for us- in Christ. The words of the beautiful hymn beg us to believe….
In Christ alone, my hope is found. He is my light, my strength, my song. This cornerstone, this solid ground- firm through the fiercest drought and storm.
What heights of love- what depths of peace! When fears are stilled, when strivings ceased. My comforter, my all in all- here in the love of Christ, I stand.
Takeheart! We are free to not measure up. We are free from constant working to be better. God not only promises to love us exactly where grace finds us, but He also promises to slowly reshape us as we focus on His love and grace seen in Christ. He won’t ever leave us, and He won’t leave us where we are. His grace not only meets us freely, it changes us entirely. The more we fill up on that truth, the more we are transformed to run and work and play and love and create and repent and be fully alive in a way that all our hard work never achieved.
So breathe grace in deep. Exhale gratitude and peace.
“Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30