Everybody knows Mary Mary, the dynamic sister duo backed up and supported by their family. At least everybody I know anyway. Well, this song just came to mind because it reminds me of what I need to do to get myself right. And soon. I have been pretty much alone in my grad school experience, no close friends or acquaintances, no one to hold me accountable or talk to about heavy issues except God. And I know very well that I need to be going to God with my issues and situations (both good and bad) but sometimes you need other people.
Lately, I stopped.
I stopped living the way I am used to and as a result I started getting bad, for lack of a word to describe my utter uselessness. It started affecting me physically. I felt drowsy and lazy while at the same time having all this nervous energy built up inside. Plus, I want you all to know that I am not coming from a place of victory against this thing just yet but I do understand it and I do know that I will be victorious. Now, back to your regularly scheduled broadcast. I was feeling ridiculously low and all of the old stuff I thought was dead and gone in the past started trying to come back. I started having awful nightmares and waking up in pools of sweat, started overeating (and I had trouble with binging in high school), started feeling just plain awful, procrastinating with the simplest tasks and putting off anything and everything that I didn't see as urgent. And the only thing I saw as urgent was sleep.
Well recently, I realized that maybe the reason I was feeling low down and just altogether messed up is because I had stopped living the way I am used to. I have not danced since I have been here. I have not worshipped in the morning before the start of my day, I have been slacking in bible study (I still do it but the commitment is not there as it should be) and I have not really been striving after God, even though I wrote posts about it. It is one thing to say something and another thing to live it out.
And that is where I come to in this little narrative. I had stopped living for God. Like, seriously! And the worst part is how long it took me to notice but God is still good and still moving in my life. Therefore I started thinking about what it meant to live. Just live and I looked at it from a secular and a Christian perspective.
According to dictionary.com to live is just to be alive and capable of vital functions. I don't really like this definition because it means that those who are disabled are not truly living. There were two definitions I looked up in my concordance though, The Hebrew chayah and the Greek zao. The first means to keep alive, to revive, to suffer to live, nourish up, preserve, and to be whole. Zao means to live, quicken.
So, I decided to read two passages: Psalm 119:17-24 (Gimel) and Psalm 118:17.
According to Psalm 119:17, to live is to keep God's word. And according to its counterpart the chapter before living is synonymous with declaring God's works. In Psalm 119:20 David says his soul broke for longing to live righteously. How can a soul break? I don't know but I know it's more powerful than when your heart breaks. From this I got that not only can I not make it on my own but if I am not living for the Lord then I am not living at all. And I had to stop putting off my responsibilities as a Christian. I wasn't really making God a priority, much less was He the center of my life. (And for those who don't know, when I say God I mean the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.) So instead of putting it off I have to start saying yes.
No more silencing the King.
Well Done by Deitrick Haddon
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