Here I am, Shanna Christine Johnson, the girl who was going to fall in love with Africa. With Uganda. She was going to build schools and change the world. But, here I am in a place so uncertain. God is ripping down walls of understanding. The things I knew to be true about myself are not so clear. The hopes and dreams I had five weeks ago are pretty much non-existent and as a result I am weak. My heart is so sensitive to emotion and discovery. I am resistant to the change, to the refinement that is happening. But, if we are true to God, faithful to his individual work then this process is what we crave. Right? What I have learned is that there are two words God is putting in front of me on a daily basis (for months, actually) . These are discipline and freedom.
If we are disciplined how can we be free? And if we are free how can we be disciplined? On one hand discipline requires a list of shoulds and should nots. It demands boundaries on our lives to create a faithfulness to Christ and His desire for our lives. And on the other, freedom requires that we are open, we throw out the shoulds and should nots in favor of acknowledging salvation as a gift of grace that cannot and will not be earned. Freedom expects that we release our cares and trust in God's infinite power and wisdom, not as a cop-out or an I don't know to the hundreds of questions we have about eternity and sin and grace and faith but as a surrender to our human finite minds and the Creator's supernatural, beautiful, all-knowing one.
And that folks is where all the doubt and all the fear is beginning to be cast aside. Discipline and freedom link arms at surrender. Where there is discipline there is a humility to the desires of God and a laying down of the things that muddle and distract our understanding of Him, of the true things of Christ. Where there is freedom there is a surrender of striving. Here we give up our hard work, the notion that we are earning our ticket to heaven by not sleeping with our boyfriends and praying in the morning. Here is the laying down of the "I'm better than you because I've spent my whole life doing it right" idea or the feeling that we deserve it.
Surrender brings forth life because as we sit in the presence of God, out of discipline, we realize His conviction and his blessing and it brings freedom. We rid ourselves of the burden of attempting to earn the one thing that can never be earned.
I am sitting on top of a mountain overlooking a city that is eating away my sense of self. I see a place I don't fully understand, thinking that if I came to this place to learn this one truth I am blessed beyond comprehension. With this nugget I will welcome the hot, raging fire that promises to turn me into gold.
"Jesus said to them, do you not say, 'There are yet four months, then comes the harvest'? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest."
John 4: 35
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