When God Vanishes

This is described a number of different ways by people; I have experienced it myself. The most apt description is "dark night of the soul," often lasting more than just one night.

People who grow close to God, where God's Love and Light shines through them, often have a period in their lives when the warmth and Peace of God's Love just seems to ... disappear.

We wonder if we did something wrong. We think we stepped off the path and have walked away from God. We believe God is mad at us and left. All we are left with are questions and a feeling of being abandoned and alone.

The questions loom large in our heart and mind. What happened?

Our Faith waivers. We start to doubt ourselves. We start to doubt the works of our hands, minds and hearts. We start to doubt our relationship with God. We may even doubt the Love that God has for us.

When we find ourselves in this situation, we are not alone. God has never abandoned us. The truth is that God couldn't be CLOSER to us than in this moment. For God is working in and through us.

Many are familiar with the "Footprints" poem. At the end, where we see only one set of footprints in the sand, God carried us.

The reason we cannot feel God close is that our perceptions are focused outwards. The adversary takes advantage of our limited perceptions to convince us that we HAVE been abandoned by God. Or that we have done something so wrong, that God has washed His hands of us.

Even Christ felt the emotional, mental and spiritual anguish of this moment as He hung on the cross: "Why have you abandoned me?"

 

Do not believe the lies.

God is with us no matter what we think, no matter what we say, no matter what we do. Christ walks into the deepest of our hells to be with us, and share with us. Do you think we would be abandoned as we strive to draw closer to God?

God works in ways we cannot see. Those who don't walk away from God when we find ourselves in this dark period, emerge into a much brighter period of their life. 

God has big plans

Designed just for you

God works within 

And through you too

Yoking About Faith

One cannot live in New England without catching at least a glimpse of it's agricultural past.

Part of that past is the yoke, which is not only for livestock to pull the plow but for a wide variety of other jobs around field and town.

Yokes were used to harness animal power at a mill, or many other ingenuous ways in a time before electricity. Horses pulled wagons loads over hill and dale centuries before the locomotive arrived.

Yokes were also put around the necks of humans to help them carry a load, such as produce from the fields or sap from the trees in late winter to make maple syrup.

It was the tool of heavy labor...

I recently read a daily inspiration that asked us to take God's yoke and not complain about being tied to it.

"Not very inspirational," I muttered to myself. Yes, I am willing to do so, but I was left a bit unmotivated by the piece.

Yeshua then informed me that I misunderstood the interpretation of the word "yoke."

I had in mind the individual yoke, a basic tool to help an individual accomplish work, making mankind a "beast of burden."

When He mentions "yoke," however, it was not the individual one He had in mind, but the joint yoke.

Digging back into memories of all those New England fair presentations, I remembered the purpose of the joint yoke. It not only kept the pair of animals on the same job at the same time, it helped them to work in unison.

More importantly, the stronger of the two was able to help the weaker one with the work, taking more of the burden when necessary.

Whatever the required work was, it accomplished as a team.

When this light bulb clicked on, the second part of the meaning blossomed into my mind.

While we may be "yoked" to a fellow human being to work on a project from time to time, the one we are truly "yoked" with through life is Christ. He is not cracking the whip behind us, but working right next to us.

When we try to wander away, we may be chafed by the yoke. But when we work with Him, so much more can be done than we can do alone.

When we are weak, He is strong. And the yoke we share will never break.

His yoke is easy, and the burden is light ~ because He will carry the greater load if we let Him.