Underwater

Malawi has the 4th largest lake in Africa.  It’s the reason tourists come here.  People snorkel and swim with amazing cichlid fish found nowhere else on earth.  While swimming with my kids there recently, I was reflecting on what happens to air, underwater.  It needs to come up to the surface.  It will stop at nothing to bubble up and out.  There is no way to keep air from pushing it’s way up through deep waters to be freed.

Ever have the feeling that God is pushing issues up from your heart like air underwater?  You try to shove them back underneath the depths, you try to fight them and press them down, but they can’t be ignored anymore?

God is gracious like that.

This year has been a painful year for so many of us, for so many reasons. And God is using it to show us issues we have pushed underneath but He wants us to have freedom from.

That need for control?  That need for certainty?  That need for financial security?

It was always there, but this year has brought it up and it is surfacing in ways that can no longer be ignored.

Maybe it’s also this time of my life, but there are obvious challenges in my personality and character that should no longer stay hidden.  God longs for so much more freedom for me than I thought I wanted.  Freedom that actually requires me to be uncomfortable at first, because it’s new.  Freedom that to be honest, is painful.  It is good but it is hard.

Some questions for personal reflection:

What issue is bursting up from deep within, that you can no longer ignore? 

What issue are you trying to shove down, but keeps surfacing?

What has this year and all that is around you, revealed within you?

What freedom is God calling you to? 

May this next year not be a year you remember for more pandemic-mania but a year you remember as the year He set you free in a new way.