Humbled, Hungry and Hope

A year begins again and I'm struck with the humbling of the year before.  God led our family into a desert in 2016.  It was not a partial desert; it was a whole sweeping, swirling, devoid of life landscape.  As we felt desolate, the Lord was causing us to hunger for a deeper trust of Himself.   Through circumstances too recent to recount, God tested us to know what was in our hearts.  Though He already knew our hearts, did we?  

Would we be content in Christ when our life was stripped from a safe and wholesome reality to one filled with anguish and distress?

Would we be willing to be taught that our best plans fall short of his?

Would we invite him to rewrite our chapters to include the painful unfinished?

Would we see His blessing in the cursed land?

Looking back, I think God desired us to know that only He, Himself, would sustain us in a land of unrelenting disappointment and heartache.  God began a process of releasing us from an existence of self-sufficiency to a state of God-sufficiency.  In the taking away, God added Himself, so we lacked no good thing.  His character was sufficient for our great deficit.  He remained when nothing else did.  Such a gentle love enfolds us.  The Lord holds out a promise that he is bringing us into a good land where emotional scarcity will be forgotten, because in the giving of his self-offered body, the Bread of Life, Jesus made sure there would always and forever be an over-abundance of himself for our need.

Here we stand on the brink of a promise, trusting in Lamentations 3:22-24. 

"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed for his compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.  I say to myself, 'The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.' "

We pray 2017 will be another year that we Taste and See the Lord is Good.