Last week, we were blessed with a fifty-four degree day, in between two snowstorms. I was super excited for some fresh air, but didn’t so much think about the repercussions of a foot of snow melting in just a few hours. Our basement {which houses both my office and a bedroom} flooded, and all my toiling to use towels and our carpet cleaner to suction up the water just couldn’t keep up with it. It finally stopped, but even with a fan the water still hadn’t dried up, so yesterday we had to rip up the carpet and underlay and get down to the bare floor.
As I was pulling up tack strips, it occurred to me — that our souls can get that way too sometimes, can’t they?
Flooded.
We can go from having nothing going on, to having too much going on- all at once. So quickly we don’t have the capacity to gracefully handle it.
Sometimes we do pretty well at handling things, a bit at a time, but when it all comes pouring in unexpectedly, we can get flooded and overwhelmed. And our emotions can get… messy.
And maybe it’s tempting to just shut the door to the basement and pretend that the flood isn’t there…deny those overwhelmed emotions and just keep going on, pretending as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
But if we did that with our basement, we’d end up with mold and more damage. More of a mess to be cleaned up later.
And if we do that with our souls, God showed me it’s the same.
And yet, even then, we are not too much of a mess for Him to clean up.
But we have to be willing to open the door to Him.
Let Him in. Let Him go to work in us.
Bit by bit, we have to cooperate with Him,
resisting the urge to ignore the problems or deny them, or keep them behind closed doors, with “towels” thrown over them but the issue not really taken care of.
When God comes in, and it’s just a little water…truly just a small thing that is overwhelming us, He can help us “suck it up.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but I NEED His help, even in the little things, because I’m not good at “sucking it up” on my own.
Even tiny things can make me feel less than peaceful, and rob me of my joy.
But with HIS help, I can be restored quickly when those little things arise.
He helps me dry up the tears and the fears and the would-be damage of failures and misunderstandings and offenses and concerns.
But sometimes, it’s not just a little bit of water that’s coming in. Sometimes it’s a flood of emotions.
Like the five miscarriages we went through.
Or losing my dad.
Or like a lot of hard things I have seen friends and loved ones go through.
And sometimes no amount of “sucking it up” is sufficient. Even when we turn to Him.
Not that he COULDN’T help us in that way, but that sometimes He helps us through those floods in other ways, and uses them even, for our good.
(Even though He doesn’t cause those bad things or wish for them to happen. And even though they are NOT at all good.)
When those things happen, the process He often takes us through very much resembles the process we are going through with our basement right now:
He has to help us stop everything for a moment, as much as possible, and deal with the mess.
Take out all the “stuff” that’s on top of the carpet, on top of the foundation, so that we can get to the root of the problem.
Check our foundation itself, (our relationship with Him), for gaps.
Let Him fill in any cracks there.
In our heart and soul.
Then- and only then, once the foundation of our identity in Him has been restored, He wants to help us rebuild upon the Rock (Jesus). He wants to restore our lives and our other relationships.
When the floodwaters rise, we must resist with everything in us the temptation to tend to the upper levels of our lives, and neglect the base. (Our relationship with Him.)
The enemy might tell us that it’s not important, or that we don’t have time to attend to it when our two-story lives are crashing down.
He might also tell us that it’s God’s fault that these things are happening to us to begin with. That He caused them, or could have stopped them but didn’t. Satan wants us to believe that God doesn’t love us or doesn’t have our backs. But it’s simply not true.
The Truth is that Satan is the father of all lies. (John 8:44).
The Truth is that God loves us so much that he gave His one and only Son- so whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Jesus himself told us in John 16 (it’s necessary to read the whole chapter but this is a part of that)— is “There is so much more I want to tell you, but you can’t bear it now. When the Spirit of truth (the Holy Spirit) comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future. He will bring me glory by telling you whatever he receives from me. All that belongs to the Father is mine; this is why I said, ‘The Spirit will tell you whatever he receives from me.’”
John 16:12-15 NLT
The whole Bible is full of the Truth.
That God loves us.
That Jesus laid down His life for us.
That the Holy Spirit longs to fill us and comfort us and help us get through ALL the floods, and help us to feel the presence of Jesus deeply inside us, so that we never believe the enemy’s lies that we are broken, flooded, damaged goods, or all alone.
I never wanted to go through some of the floods I went through. God didn’t want that for me either. Though He did warn me that in this world, things like that happen:
“I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33 NLT
Take heart.
It’s not a flippant, empty comfort.
Not a pat-on-the back “It’s all small stuff, don’t sweat it” line of bull crap.
It’s an instruction to the place of comfort…
some of the last words of Jesus before He went to the cross
Before He willingly took on the pains and punishments of this world so that He could understand instead of being a God who can’t relate to us,
and so that He could open up the door to the Father once again that Adam’s sin (and everyone’s since) had kept locked…
So that He could send the Holy Spirit, to GIVE us HIS heart and courage and comfort and love, when we are so weak that we cannot even “take heart” on our own.
Dwelling on the depth of this love of His for us, being sucked in by that- it’s the only way to suck the floodwaters off of our souls, so that we can breathe again… and be restored…and build upon our eternal lives, our SOUL lives, so that we will still be standing (in our new bodies, in the new Heaven and Earth) even when this life is over.
And looking back I can thank God for the floods even, because without them, I’d have never pulled up the “carpet” of all the cares and “callings” and blessings of this world, to discover the richness and firmness of His foundation.
Jesus said “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.”
Matthew 7:24-27 NLT
And the most beautifully undeserved blessing, for me, is that even when I built upon sand, and even when life felt like it collapsed…he gathered all my pieces, put me back together, put His Word in my heart, and is helping me build my eternal life on Him.
As long as you’re alive, it’s never too late to start building what matters most- your ETERNAL LIFE- on the foundation of Jesus, with Him.
What the enemy meant to drown us with, to flood us with, God can use even that to give us a fresh start.
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