“I don’t come as a student, bright-eyed to learn with sharpened number-two pencils and a clean page. I come full. Filled up with murky thoughts and questions about life and my heart, and sometimes even numbness — full of numbness. But this is what I bring: me. I bring myself to the Word and to Jesus. . . . And we meet.”- Sara Hagerty
In Chapter 10 (“The Better Food for Our Disheveled Heads: The Beginning of Limitlessness, within Our Limits”) of The Gift of Limitations, Sara Hagerty talks about bringing her anxiety, fear, and dull approach to God. As a result, she gets a reset. Instead of her day starting as a run-on sentence from the night before.
Therefore, rather than bristle at how distant and disconnected from your reality God’s Word feels, Sara exhorts you to:
- trust you’ll acclimate to the Word if you stay.
- warm to the gentle whispers of Gd, like breath on your neck
- unfurl a bit more into who God made you to be, not who you’re working so hard to be to buoy yourself in this torrent of a world.
- proceed, not in giant leaps, but slowly and shuffling.
Certainly, Sara acknowledges, reading the Word each day and being held by God doesn’t change how He feels about you. But it dramatically changes how you live and see the world.
Therefore, Sara explains:
“The key isn’t what I thought it was all along: the format, the time, the effort. The key is bringing my unkempt heart into a place where His Word can hold me, where I can let myself be seen by Him, where I position myself to need Him and receive what He has to say to my neediness. Though this practice doesn’t change how God sees me, it changes how I see God. . . . The more I make it a practice to sit in His lap, with all the mess of me, the more settled I feel.”
Today’s question: What Bible verses bring clarity to your murky thoughts and questions? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “From the didactic to the personal”
