When we worship it’s our choice to take whatever is ever present in our current perspective and refocus ourselves to God’s ultimate power, cover it with His grace, His love and courage as He pours out the process of renewing us again and again in whatever season we are facing. I am in a season of stillness and quiet. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the one thing I craved in my season of chaos.
However, God is teaching me so much awesomeness like: where my identity lies, what I truly worship, what is my first love. And confession time: it isn’t Him. Sigh. It’s a painful revelation to conclude the One I thought I was living for is masked in “working” for Him, and for His Bride. It’s found in doing, not so much just being. For so long now God has kept the calling of Worship Pastor on me. Through various chapters in my life, I’ve wrestled with the need for title, then arriving at the need to not have it but the desire to use the gifts He had given anyway in that context. I’ve loved it and I’ve hated it. The only constant across my varying degrees of fulfilling “the call” was God’s incessant and relentless pursuit of me, and my desperate attempt to love Him in return. But shock upon horror I just figured out it was conditional to my environment. Don’t get me wrong, it is true you flourish where you are planted and I really could sing of His love forever when all the ‘things’ lined up, the platform looked right, or the environment ‘felt’ right… but what about those seasons where you are uprooted? Are you no longer due to flourish? Or is your growth stunted? No. Not necessarily.
Growth looks different when the roots are exposed. It’s true pruning, the identity-soul-searching-rip-your-heart-out-and-plant-again type of season. It’s the tilling of the ground. Have you ever had to dig a hole in soil? Like real dirt? It’s pretty hard work. Tough soil is hard to dig into with a hand spade let alone a shovel with the strength of ten men. Dry soil is dry because it has given out all of its nutrients in other seasons to keep the garden growing, even if it’s only growing weeds. Soil needs the right conditions to grow anything, so if you’ve expended the entirety of your healthy overflow into the fruit of your ministry you will still need to keep your personal garden fruitful, watered, pruned, and making constant room for the growth. An overgrown garden can look like chaos on the outside, it’s in the behind the scenes revelations we realise we need to be poured into again and again to allow the best type of overflow – the overflow that flourishes and nourishes others. It takes time to restore a damaged garden bed, and let me honest it’s not fun or shiny. A well kept garden not only has soft ground ready to be stirred up, but it has the right ground for seeds entrusted to be nourished and therefore grow into something beautiful. Fun fact: weeds don’t need good soil… they will grow anywhere, so we need to be ready to declutter our gardens of cheapened overflow.
Sometimes seasons of preparing the soil will be laborious, quiet or still as you wait (impatiently!?!) for something to grow. For something to make sense, for something to be seen. But wait for it. Though the vision tarry it will come to pass (Habakkuk 2:3), there is work in the waiting. It’s hard waiting, but it’s harder work when we push our agenda against the grain of a season we were supposed to be still in. I’m sitting here in a place of absolute silence as I write, but my thoughts are louder than ever. I’m in a season where the soil is literally being bulldozed in my heart. It’s lousy and I hate it. I have to make a conscious decision to make this a season where the troughs are being watered, fertilised and fed well and make allowances to become prepared. I have to remind myself to use this precious time wisely, not wishing I were in my established beautiful garden of tulips when I might only be growing ground cover. I have learned that while I am waiting, God is still doing something profound in me. I am learning what it means to go back to the basics of why I do what I do. Is it for me? Or is it for Him? Is God my little genie who will make my wishes and dreams and hopes all come true? Or is He the provider, the paver and the plougher? Will I let Him make a way in the wasteland? Or will I make myself the boss and journey on without Him?
In the stillness, He is God. In the chaos, He is God. He is God. Fullstop. I am learning, I am not. It’s a tough wrestle – to truly surrender. But what a gorgeous season lay in wait if we yield to Him in the interim seasons of life. The author and perfect gardener of our faith awaits a beautiful Bride made up of our individual journeys of obedience, growth, challenge and hardship. The One who has gone before, and the One who is working in us, is in the waiting. I can’t say I have ever waited well – perhaps this recurring pattern in my life will be the biggest lesson He will teach me to wait on Him. I waited for seven and a half years to marry the man I knew I would marry two weeks into dating. I waited three years to conceive our firstborn son. I’ve waited for this dream to eventuate through many different landscapes – many of them valleys. But, still I will hold to His faithfulness; He doesn’t change, so He won’t start being different now.
Here we are returning to the season of stillness: re-learning what it means to make Him my first love again and again – The Ultimate. Re-adapting to embracing a place of stripped back, of bareness as I pursue trusting in Him more than asking of Him clarity. Oh the things He is teaching me in this season. May it be Him alone we truly worship when arrive at Spring and step into the harvest of our growth under ground. It’s on its way. He is faithful.