God's Puzzle: Prologue

I’ve been meaning to do this post for at least six months. This is going to be a {hopefully} brief post {imagine that red text is crossed out – brief...who was I kidding!} simply tracing what God has been teaching me over the past year – because it’s been an amazing time of growth for me.

First, a bit of background. This isn’t easy for me to admit – but I’d have to say that during most of high school and the first year and a half of college my spiritual life was, for the most part, stagnant. I had plenty of head knowledge about God, but I felt an almost complete lack of any real relationship with Him. And I desperately wanted that relationship. There were plenty of times I would shut myself into my room and cry at nights because I didn’t feel God and I wanted to so badly. It never made any sense to me. God wants a relationship with me, right??? Then why don’t I seem to have one if He wants it and I want it? I don’t have the answer to that question – but this post is going to focus on the growth I have had since then to a time when I have felt that relationship in a more real and tangible way than ever before. Yes, I know feelings aren’t everything. But I am human and feelings are part of the equation.

This next part is a bit out of place, but it will help explain things. In February of last year, one of the JBU professors spoke at the campus women’s retreat. She talked about knowing God in three ways: Intellectually, Experientially, and Affectively (Emotionally). As I wrote in my journal reflecting on that, “I’ve known about God intellectually all my life, in a growing sense. I would say that I started to know Him experientially when we went to China. I saw and experienced how He provided for us in the years afterward, and there were things like the NO, LA {New Orleans, Louisiana} trip too. I’d say I really started knowing God affectively once I came to JBU and especially this semester. Things like chapel and The Furnace and then everything this semester has shown me a side of God I hadn’t really thought about or connected with before.”

So anyway, in September 2010 I wrote my first post on this blog after a year of silence. It’s like the prologue to everything that has happened since. Let me just say here that it has been so important for me personally to write about what God is doing in my life. It can be so encouraging to go back and look through what I was thinking and feeling and see how God has been faithful in answering my heart’s cry – even when I felt at the time as though He wasn’t listening.

I didn’t blog or really journal much again until December. When I finally did journal, it was an entry full of the frustration I expressed in my “background” paragraph above. My sophomore fall was a tough semester – not because of difficult school work, but because of apathy…about everything. I ended with a plea to God that He would “grant me the ability to rest & trust in You and to STOP trying to live it out on my own.” When I reread that in September, it struck me that God answered that cry the next semester – Spring 2011, the semester that has honestly changed my spiritual life.

[Please note – all of this was written late night/early morning of Nov. 16/17. I’m just breaking it up into sections and posting it during the next week or so, so that maybe people won’t feel as overwhelmed by it….

The title comes from the fact that it seems each lesson and event has been a puzzle piece that has fit perfectly into the bigger picture of what God has been doing in my life.]