31 Days: When You Just Don’t Feel Like You Belong – Revival: {Day 4}

I never thought I had any gifts.  I was shy, withdrawn, and when God talked about “the body of Christ” in scripture, I thought somehow He had missed me.

I never felt like I belonged. I felt I had no purpose, except to “be good”..and, “do what other people told me to”.

So, I taught Sunday School and obeyed all the rules after being swept up from the floor of my miserable state prior to marriage.

I wanted to prove that I really did fit in, I really did belong….Even though my heart told me different.

I felt like a mechanical robot going through the motions.  My heart wasn’t in it.

In public I could fake it, but deep down, I knew I didn’t have true peace or deliverance. At night I was tormented.  Old fears would come to paralyze me, keeping me from experiencing the fullness of God.

Sometimes it went on, all night long.  So much so that I didn’t sleep.

At church I became an expert at at hiding what plagued me in the darkness. Have you ever done that?

Even after going to counseling, reading every book about the psychology of the brain’ after studying mechanisms, theories, and man’s explanation for fear and trepidation.  Nothing was able to set me free….

Or so I thought.

I wanted so bad to be a “good Christian”.  But eventually the truth of our hearts will find us out.  And hiding can’t help, when all we have left is the reflection of an empty well inside us, crying out for more.

That is until I got into my new church, the church I stepped foot in and swore I was never leaving.  

For weeks all I did was weep and continually keep weeping.  God was opening up my eyes to what I was without Him.  He was revealing my sin, which I spent week after week in the midst of revival, quietly repenting of.

People must of thought I was strange, but for the first time in all of my existence….I didn’t care.  God was in my midst.  God was clearly doing something inside me that I couldn’t do myself.

For the first time since childhood, I could see Him, feel Him….alive, kind, and compassionate.

For the first time since Bible Camp….I knew He wanted relationship with me.  Regardless of where I had been.  Regardless of what I had done.

I no longer felt rejected.  But loved, accepted….forgiven.

God was moving, and He was pealing off all the layers of self-sufficiency.  This self dependency, I had, for years, been placing around me.

This revival (unlike others maybe) was less of a hurricane and more like a gentle moving of the Spirit.  His presence was humbling people, touching people, drawing people in a way that words truly can’t explain.

People prayed, came forward, would lay their cigarettes on the alter.  People were confessing sins, repenting. In multitudes. And in the center of His presence, for the first time ever, I felt joy in wanting to give all of my life over to Him.

Along with others, I just naturally joined in the laying on of hands of those around me. Prayer was seen everywhere.  At all times.  Before, during, and after the service.

No one seemed strange or different there.  I don’t know, maybe they did…but I didn’t care.

People who had just got out from prison, were seen joining with business men, in prayer.  Little old ladies and shut in’s were cared for.  Teenagers and groups of people willingly went out into the streets, led by God to reach the lost and the destitute.

As a result, many got saved.  The church rapidly grew.

See from what I can tell, revival (or God for that matter) was never meant to be like a pot with a lid on it, controlled….boiling on the stove.  True revival is topless and just naturally explodes outward.  True revival is uncontainable, explosive, radical.  True revival just naturally bubbles over on all those around it.  

True revival can’t help but spill outward…impacting families, uncontrollably touching, those who live in surrounding communities.

True revival not only divides us from our self-righteousness, but multiplies to others, effortlessly and exponentially.

For the first time in my life, my heart was wall-less.  I was abandoned to what God wanted to do.  For the first time ever, I joined willingly this move of God…and was never looking back.

For first time since my sorrowful, painful, introverted childhood, I felt like I belonged, to not only a group of people…but more importantly…

To God himself.

(Linking with Barbie)