Today i finished with the northern kingdom, only a few more lessons to finish out the divided kingdom, and then i get to talk about prophets, which i am really looking forward to...
tomorrow i am doing a "debrief" day... kind of a reflection on where we've been, and where we're going. here's what i'm gonna say:
Now that we’ve finished up to the end of the Northern kingdom, I want to take a breather and spend some time reflecting and processing.
The divided kingdom is confusing. It’s broken. It’s messed up. But I think it’s really beautiful in the middle of all of that. For me, an overarching theme that we can see in play throughout this time is the Lord’s faithfulness. He is faithful to his people; he is faithful to his promises. He is faithful. I think that so often we as believers see what these Israelites are doing and how they’re acting (finding other gods to worship, forgetting about what the Lord has done for them, etc.) and we kind of look down on them, we judge them a little bit for what they’ve gotten themselves into. Would you agree with that? The more I thought about it and reflected on it, the more I realized that I AM AN ISRAELITE. Every day I forget about the Lord and his faithfulness. Every day I forget that the Lord is good and at work. Every day I need to be delivered to some extent or another. Who am I (or we) to judge them?? So often we live day-to-day and we don’t even think about the Lord. Like some of the kings we’ve talked about, we don’t think about Him or what he’s doing in and for us until we’re in a really tight spot.
When I was given the task to teach the Divided Kingdom a few different thoughts and emotions came to me:
- I was incredibly overwhelmed. I knew (and pretty much still know…) very little about the Divided Kingdom. I promise you I’m learning just as much as you are…
- How are a bunch of kings and confusing names and killing and scheming and death and lying and idolatry… (you get the picture…) relevant to me today? How can I possibly make it relevant to you guys??
Like I said earlier I think that the Lord and his faithfulness is an incredibly dominant theme during this time. I know that the Lord gave me this curriculum specifically because I needed to learn about his faithfulness. I needed to be reminded of his goodness. I needed to see how he keeps his promises… I haven’t always been able to see that God is faithful in my life. That’s not to say that he hasn’t always been faithful… I just had a hard time seeing it for a while… my junior year at CIU was slightly tumultuous, to say the least. In the middle of dealing with all of the things that happened during that semester, I had spent my entire fall semester in counseling, I began to struggle with depression during my sophomore year, and was going to counseling to work through that… at the end of that spring semester I was a shell of who I used to be, my roommate and that entire situation drained me beyond what I had to give, and I honestly didn’t even know who I was anymore. I seriously doubted God’s faithfulness or goodness or grace… I saw everything that I went through and I thought that there was no way that God was any of those things. I came home that summer, broken and disbelieving and empty. In July of that summer I went to counseling at my parents request at this school called Regent in Va Beach (a really big Christian University there) and began to work through that brokenness and emptiness...
Have any of you seen Invention of Lying? This is NOT a recommendation to go out and watch it, by any means, but there was one part that really got my attention…
Some background: the movie is about a society that does not lie, not any kind of lying, in fact, they don’t even know what a lie is. It follows the main character (who is played by Ricky Gervais) and shows how he is actually the first person to ever tell a lie; and since no one even knows what a lie is, they have no choice but to believe everything he says…
In on scene, his mother is on her death bed, and scared of death and life just ending, so Ricky makes up this place that she will go after she dies, where everyone gets a mansion and everything is happy… when people hear of this place they begin to ask how they can get there, so Ricky makes up some more lies… he starts off by saying that there is this “Big Guy in the Sky” who controls everything, someone immediately counters this statement by asking “so does he make all the bad things happen??” Ricky replies by saying “Well, yes… but he makes the good things happen too…”
How many times do we think of God like this? Some big guy in the sky?
How do you think of God?
Do you think of him as “The Big Guy in the Sky”?
Do you know that God desires more than that from us? With us?
I’m sure you “know” that, but do you believe it? Do you pursue him like it true?
I went to counseling for the rest of the summer, and decided not to go back to CIU for the fall semester of my senior year. I needed time to breathe, I needed time to recover, I needed time to recognize the Lords faithfulness, goodness and grace in my life.
I know for a fact now, in retrospect, that the brokenness that the Lord brought into my life, was in fact him being faithful to me, I’ve learned and grown so much through that time in my life, I can honestly say I would never take it back, or trade it for anything…
How has the Lord been good/faithful/gracious to you?
How was he all of those things to the Israelites?
Can you see any other themes throughout this time?
I have to say that my brokenness is nothing in comparison to that which we’ve seen in what we’ve covered thus far, and it is encouraging to me to see that he’s faithful to these kings and to the promises he’s made to them.
In Isaiah 30:18, it says that the Lord LONGS to be gracious to us…
How is the Lord gracious, good, faithful… to you?
1 comment:
I love your honesty, Nicole. I will be praying that the Lord uses your authenticity in big ways.
(and one thing I hope you see before you teach - perhaps ask them if they see any part of themselves that's like you, or like the Israelites. Before they see how CRAZY God's faithfulness is, they have to see their own unfaithfulness...and in high school I never would have seen my unfaithfulness unless someone asked me intentionally!)
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