Are You Willing to Lean?

On more than one occasion over my four score plus years, during the many ‘adventures’ we have faced, people have teased me, asking me if I am related to Job. Even one of the physicians on my medical maze team made a comment recently stating: “You may be in your mid-60ish range, but your body is more like one hundred and sixty something!”  (Gee thanks, Doc, even if I, more than often do feel one hundred and sixty something!)

I especially find it amusing when people ask if I’m related to Job, as one title I toyed with for my first book, before I settled on Loose Screws and Skinned Knees, was: Does Job Have a Sister? (Not that I want to know! I don’t want to live even close to 160-200 years old!)   

Yes, I’ve encountered many obstacles.  Yes, I am literally ‘screwed up” and bolted together in more than a few places (like a dozen or so more?!). Over the decades, well intentioned “friends” have come to me declaring “this is happening because you must have some secret sin” or “you don’t have enough faith” or the classic: “God is punishing you for something you must have said or done.”  With friends like that, who needs enemies, eh?

Sure, I’ve had my days when I have wailed: “WHY is this happening, God?” as I lay crumbled on the floor in tears. But I have had many more days, instead of wailing “WHY?” I have learned to do somethingauthor/speaker Sheila Walsh so eloquently said this week. On Wednesdays in the Word on LIFE Today, she recounted her times of ‘wailing’. Shelia shared she learned to LEAN into, to be REAL, to be HONEST to the One who LISTENS. After all, if God allowed Satan to do anything he wanted to against Job, (except kill him), whoi are we to argue with the One who LISTENS when we wail about what He has allowed us to experience?
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I had a poster that hung on my bedroom wall in high school 40+ years ago. I took it with me when I went off to college and hung it on my college dorm room wall above my head.  Shortly after I got married, my husband framed the poster. Since that time, it has prominently hung in every home we have lived in to this day.  We have purposely hung the framed poster where I will see it often. The photo on the poster is of one of my favorite “run away to” places: Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, OR. I would ‘run” when I was spent.  I would ‘run’ when I was at the end of my rope, or I would 'run' when I finally waved the proverbial white flag, and came to the end of myself. Haystack Rock and the ocean beach allowed me to wail at the top of my lungs without fear of being heard by other human voices. When I was on empty, when I was spent, tears cascading down my cheeks, I could hear  words being whispered on the ocean breeze: “Be still, and know…”  The exact words on the poster.

A short time ago I learned the phrase “ to be still”, in Hebrew, means “to release; to let go”. Or as I might put it in my last blog post: to “REST: R elinquish E verything, S ubmit Totally; to quit trying to hang on to, or to stuff deep inside me, whatever I was wrestling with. To rest means to get my grubby hands off of the situation, to  open my tightly clenched fist, palm side upwards, and let go.

It will not to do any good in the span of Eternity, to lash out at the circumstances I find myself in. Nor will it be helpful to lash out at my so-called ‘friends’.  But it will do me good to be real. It will do me good to be honest as I lay crumpled in a crying heap, as I wail to the One who LISTENS, and let it all go.

How about it? Are you willing to join me as I  LEAN  into the One who LISTENS?