A Broad Horizon Can Provide Us With An Idea
It isn’t easy to know how to proceed if you don’t see what is possible. A broad horizon can provide us an idea of where to travel. I recently drove to a location I had only visited a few times. I navigated there more by remembering the hills and the surrounding horizon than by road signs. After I parked in the driveway of a small farmhouse, I snapped these pictures.
Unfortunately, these pictures don’t render the vastness of the panoramic view. Yet, this view is etched among my first memories. My great-uncles lived here in the house built on the side of a hill. The uncles lived here and ranched while they took care of their mother, who was my mother’s maternal grandmother. (my great-grandmother) I remember being here when I was three or four years old. Many adults (mom and dad included) played baseball in the pasture across the street. As I sat in the driveway, I remembered watching them play ball while I was a small boy standing on the front porch. Then, and now, decades later, while looking across the serene prairie, I can hear my mother laughing. It wasn’t the laugh she has now but a young woman’s laugh.
Many things have changed in my life, but the hills and the surrounding horizon look the same, at least in this little piece of a sprawling Texas prairie. And although the horizon looks the same geographically. My internal horizon became very small before I ever graduated high school.
An obstructed view
Worries, doubts, and distractions took root before my eyes like a break of scrub cedars. It made it impossible to see very far. Likewise, it limited my vision, narrowed my thinking, and inhibited my knowledge of possibilities. I was only trying to find someone to be with and share a life with, but I didn’t know much about life. Removing these cedars is difficult because their tap roots grew deep into the dry caliche soil of my heart. And any combination of cutting, burning, or bulldozing is not conducive to proper healing.
As Christopher Cook wrote¹, if you want to experience wholeness and redemption, moving forward through pain etched with scars is a nonnegotiable choice. Therefore, we must commit to showing up in the truth of what happened and where we are in life today. The early traumatic memories of our past must experience healing by the power of the Holy Spirit because, without it, we’re involuntarily charting a course whose navigational devices are fear, pain, shame, blame, and victimhood. So, this is why the output of our lives is wholly dependent on the interior health of our hearts. It is time to work the ground of our hearts.
It has taken me “40 years” in the wilderness to learn about life. They’ve been some pretty hard years. But, a wise woman once wrote that God doesn’t waste our pain. I guess she learned that wisdom from the Bible.
She may have learned it from James 1:2-4. The passage reads, Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
Our need to grow
Dr. C.H.E. Sadaphal wrote that God would not allow pain or send it if it were not beneficial; the benefit is the development of a Christlike character. Such a character will not develop in our lives without adversity. It is our natural human reaction always to want the pain to go away or the trial to be over as soon as possible. This reveals yet another reason why pain is beneficial: the Lord uses it to reveal to us our need to grow so that we will reach out to Him to change us more. Consequently, He will not remove the adversity until we have profited from it.
Back to my metaphor: it may take us “40 years” before the Lord removes our adversity if our hearts are like the dry caliche soil. Only then can we grow above the things that obstruct our view. Only then can a broad horizon provide us with an idea of how we can travel through life.
Psalm 103:11-14
For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.
In a matter of speaking, God is The Broad Horizon–A Broad Horizon Can Provide Us With An Idea. It is not just any idea, rather, it is an idea of where and how to travel through life for His glory.
¹(healing what you can’t erase – Christopher Cook – chapter ten, pgs 156,157 Penguin Random House LLC)