Dryness counts

My night is winding down with tea, and watching the prayer room online. Mmm. It's going to be good sleeping tonight.

Our morning started with a teaching by Wes Martin, called 'The Father heart of God." He started out with this scientific teaching on how big the cosmos are (reminded me of the How Great is Our God sermon by Louie Giglio). That the cosmos, the created universe, is 13 billion light years wide. That is 76,254,048,000,000,000,000,000 miles in length ( I don't even know what you call that number). And just to give you perspective, the milky way galaxy, which is only 1 of around 1 million galaxies, is 100,000 light years wide, meaning it would take around 100,000 years to cross it. For 1 galaxy. And God spoke this into existence. In fact, in the Bible, it only gets 1/2 sentence credit. "In the beginning God created the heavens..." That's it. So that makes me wonder, who are we to question something that the Bible may say only once. We really have no idea how significant it is.

I will just preface this by saying that this paragraph is either my paraphrase, or quoting Wes' notes. He went on to talk about how that is our Dad who made the heavens. And He says we can approach Him. And the same way that we take on traits of our parents, we take on the traits of our Dad in heaven. Cool. The main point throughout this lesson, was that God is glad over us, that He likes us, that He enjoys us. For a variety of reasons, we can get a skewed vision of how God relates to us as Father, and we don't know that we can trust Him. The #1 accusation from the enemy is that God isn't good. So we put all sorts of walls up. But, we are made glad WITH His presence (Ps 21:6). God designed the human spirit in His image, with great capacity for gladness. As we become students of God's emotions, we grow in revelation of His tender mercy, then His gladness, then His affection. God is not quickly shaken from His gladness, so we don't need to be, either. It's settled, He is eternally glad. God has thoughts toward us that are as numberless as grains of sand, which means He takes time to think about us. We think of things we delight in.

The prayer room was pretty rough on me today. I felt super dry. Which is bound to hit. I was pretty discouraged, until the Lord reminded of the first chapter of a book I am reading called "Deep Unto Deep," by Dana Candler. I couldn't engage, then there was a weird situation with someone sitting next to me, and I got all distracted, and couldn't figure out why I was in such a funk. But everyone is so encouraging around here. They understand those dry days, seasons, years. Galatians 6:8, "The one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life." So the Lord led me to these excerpts from Dana's book:

~As Creator and Savior, He loves and enjoys the process of our finding our strength in Him and learning to lean into Him.
~He has set up His kingdom with the inclusion of our weakness.
~He calls it a victory when we willingly lift our voice to Him from the wilderness of our barrenness. This He calls noble. This he deems wise. In this place, our weak words overcome His great heart.
~He has angels without number, and He knows each star by name, yet by my small heart, He is conquered.
~Every movement of the heart toward Him in the midst of hardship will be trumpeted forever.

So, I had to sit back, and remember that dryness counts. It counts to my Dad in heaven. I am victorious. Ha, and on that note. Elizabeth and I went for a walk this evening and found a dead snake on the road. What is really cool about that, is that on Saturday night the teacher talked about how just this past week he found a dead snake on the road and God reminded him of the verse that says the offspring, Jesus, will crush the head of the serpent. Victory. And here, I had had a bad day, and there it was, a crushed snake on the side of the road. Victory. I won't be beaten, as I ABIDE with Jesus.