The best word I can think of to describe Arie is “intentional.” She’s intentional in her prayers, in her devotion to God, in her faithfulness to her friends, in her work and in her church. She is honest and open and willing to confess what she does not understand, and I think you’ll see in her writing the way that her own honest opens the way for us all to be honest and vulnerable before the Lord and each other.
A Woman Seeking to Know Her God When She Doesn’t Understand Him | www.codyandras.com/blog/2017/8/3/a-woman-seeking-to-know-her-god-when-she-doesnt-understand-him
About a year ago, I watched a dream that was making a perfect arc across my life toward completion burn up like a shooting star and disappear. One day the dream was coming true, and the next it was just gone, from bright hope to ash so quickly it was like it had never existed at all. Then in the spring, God breathed new life into a dream I laid to rest so long ago I’d forgotten it was even composting in my heart.
“God,” I told Him, “I don’t understand your timing.”
One ring of my phone that same week jolted a carefree Saturday morning barre class and Starbucks run back to the reality that life is fragile and fleeting. My high school best friend, Jenny, called to tell me she’d been diagnosed with a fairly aggressive form of cancer and, as if that wasn’t hard enough, she was also eight weeks pregnant. Doctors were encouraging her to abort her baby so she could have a chance at beating the cancer.
“God,” I wept on Jenny’s behalf, “I don’t understand Your ways.”
Jenny (right) and I (Arie) living out our beach dreams in the Canary Islands.
Again and again, in tender moments of confession, I found myself crying out to Him, “I just don’t understand You.”
And like He always does, when I come to Him with the depths of my heart, He started trading beauty for the ashes in my life, this time leaving a question to echo in my heart:
“Do you really want a God you can understand?”
For me, the answer was easy. I don’t even understand myself, for heaven’s sake! What in the world would I do with a God who makes sense to me?
So my prayers started changing. “Lord, thank You for being a God I don’t understand. Thank You that Your ways are higher than mine. Thank You that Your thoughts are so much more vast than human thoughts.”
I must not be the only one having this conversation with God. Lauren Daigle could’ve taken the words to her song “God You Have My Surrender” straight off the pages of my journal:
“Here are my hopes
Here are my doubts
Here are the things that I can’t figure out
Here are my storms, my crashing seas
Here are the burdens that have brought me to my knees.”
Her chorus has become my anthem for this season:
“And I will take you at your unfailing word
More than all I want, I will seek you first
I will bless your name when the night is long
God you have my surrender.”
So this isn’t a season of failing to understand God at all. Instead, I’m making this a season of taking my God at His unfailing word and becoming a woman who seeks to know her God in a season of surrender.
Please pray for Jenny, her husband Alex, and their sweet baby, who’s already survived a major surgery – What a beautiful miracle! We’re asking for complete healing. Jenny is determined that God will be glorified in her life through this and we know He will do it. For me, it would mean the world if you could ask God to give me wisdom and new vision as I move into a time of transition, that He would make me loving and faithful, that people would know me only by my love for Jesus, and that God will make a way for marriage and family in my life. I’m deeply humbled by and thankful for your prayers!
This post is part of the Summer of Seasons that Darcee and I are hosting. Our hope is that as others share about seeking God in their particular season of life, we would all be encouraged to know and love and seek after the Lord more in our daily lives.
