Humble Yourself Before The Lord

*June 17, 2018

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up.- James 4:10

I’ve been sitting here, trying to think of a way to describe my last couple of months, and even the last year in general that sums everything up. But how do you sum up moving to a new place, meeting tons of new people, being healed and in remission from chronic disease, new jobs, new paths, and ultimately a fresh start. 

The word that keeps coming to me is “humbled”. 

The Lord has taught me a lot over the past year. My spiritual life has taken on a new realm over the last twelve months and it all started when I moved to Peterborough. Which only confirms with me even more that God has been orchestrating every step of this journey. A little over a year ago, my friend and I had prayed and asked God to guide us in the decision of moving in together. We asked that if this was what he wanted for us, that he would provide us with a place we could afford, in a safe neighborhood, that would be available within the month. And he gave it to us. One year ago, I was living with my parents in the middle of nowhere, fighting lyme disease and desperate for a change and today, I’m living in my own apartment, healed of lyme disease, working full-time, training to become a doula, and living a very full life. God can change things quickly.

It’s funny to me that when I look back over this year, it seems to have flown by but living it felt like it had lasted a lifetime. So much has happened in just 365 days. So much has changed. I have changed. God has changed me.

When I moved to Peterborough, I definitely had a desire to grow in my spiritual life but I wasn’t prepared for what the Lord had in store for me here. I was still skeptical and shallow in my faith in a lot of ways. I didn’t believe in the slightest that God would heal me of my disease. I didn’t grasp the fact that God cares so much about me, that he would do anything to draw me closer to Him. And my third day in Peterborough I wound up at the young adults group that I now happily call a group of my closest friends.

This group has been such a massive blessing to me. I immediately was stretched and challenged in my faith. I could feel God breaking down the walls my insecurities and self-doubt had built up. I could feel him molding me into the woman he designed me to be, and not the woman that this broken world had turned me into. He was healing my heart and healing my body from years of turmoil, depression, and pain.

It took feeling extremely exposed and vulnerable to get to the place that I am in now. And I know, I am nowhere near finished. God isn’t done with me yet. We’re just getting started. But these experiences over the past year taught me the importance of humbling myself before the Lord.

I had heard that saying in the past, but didn’t understand what it meant or why it was important. But now when I look back, I see that was what God was teaching me all this time. To humble yourself before the Lord, is to acknowledge that He is infinitely more wise, all-powerful, all-knowing and good, and that we, are mere humans. We mess up, we fall into temptation and sin, we know nothing compared to the God of the universe, and we won’t always get answers to the questions that we have for God. But we must trust that we don’t need to know the answers, because the one who has all the answers, who knows all things, made us out of love and cherishes us deeply. He has great plans for us to prosper us and to mature us into the people he created us to be. People who can live free and unbridled from sin and shame.

To me, humbling myself before the Lord has meant a lot of things. It has meant speaking up with prayer requests that expose a vulnerable side of me. It has meant praying out loud in a group even with a fear of being the center of attention. It has meant trusting and believing that God could and would heal me, and seeing him actually do it. It has meant receiving God’s forgiveness and grace for things that I felt ashamed of. It has meant learning to forgive myself, and others for the ways in which they have hurt me. It has meant apologizing when I am wrong. It has meant trusting God with every aspect of my life. It has meant making plans and placing them in God’s hands because I believe that God’s timing is better than my own, and that His plan for me is better than my own could ever be.

There is a prayer I found earlier this year that I began to recite every morning as I got ready for the day, it goes like this:

Dear Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept your will for my life. I give myself, my time, my all, utterly to you to be yours forever. Fill me and seal me with the Holy Spirit. Use me as you will, send me where you will, work out your whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever. Amen.

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.” - Isaiah 55:8

His ways are SO much greater than our own and His plans are infinitely better and wiser than our own. When we view God through our own human perspective, we limit him in our minds. But when we accept God for exactly who he is, which is Higher and Greater and All-knowing and All-powerful, He is LIMITLESS.