Empty Rooms

Last week, I re-read all of my blog entries. I've only been blogging since November, so that wasn't a big task, yet just enough of a representative sampling to reveal a pattern to me.

My mind went back to the months just before I began this blogging venture... I had heard a podcast message about Dreams. Not about the kind we have when we are asleep, but the kind we have when we are very much awake, the kind God plants in our hearts and minds. The message was a very good one, and while it was an encouragement, and an uplifting word, I cried the whole way through it. I became painfully aware that I had become cynical, and I had allowed the subtle scourge of disappointment to taint my expectations of God's working in my life. I cried because I knew that I should know better. I spent that whole day wrestling with my 'self'. I sought His forgiveness, and asked Him to fix me.

I see that 'fixing process' subsequently unfolding in many of my blog postings, especially because I can remember what was going on when I wrote them. My very first one had to do with having the courage to dream again. Many of the entries beckon my own heart, little by little, to reaffirm what I know in the depths of my soul to be Truth, things muddled by the effects of discouragement. Over the past several months, God has brought insights from people, books, and even my own memories that have been fixing me. And, today those thoughts kind of all came together in a "Eureka" (breakthrough) kind of moment as I was reading a book (The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind by Bill Johnson).

In his chapter discussing our 'spiritual inheritance', Johnson uses Luke 11:24-26 to illustrate a point. The passage refers to Jesus's description of an 'unclean spirit' leaving a man, but coming back to find the abandoned area swept and in order, so it brings its nasty friends and they set up camp again. Johnson says that when a person gets set 'free', they have a responsibility to manage that territory, or they'll lose it. "When the victories of [the] past... go unoccupied, they become the platform from which the enemy mocks...launches an assault... to erase from their memories their inherited victories. When we back off of the standard that God has set, we literally invite the devourer to destroy." He was actually purporting that Christians often don't 'occupy' their inherited spiritual territory won through prior spiritual victories. I understand his point, but I actually got something more from Jesus's parable, that really applies to me:

I believe that disappointments are unoccupied territory. They can become encampments for the enemy, who mocks hope and taunts with twisted truisms... UNLESS, I exercise my responsibility to occupy that territory with the testimony of Truth. I thought I was being stoic and strong by closing the door on disappointments, putting them behind me, ...but I was leaving an empty room. What I've needed to do is to redecorate. I need to refurnish that territory and occupy it, by actively applying the Word of God to my daily life, my emotions, and especially the things that hurt, and by reaffirming who and what I KNOW Him to be. My disappointments left me feeling betrayed, but I know that is false. And so I must occupy that empty feeling with the truths of encouragement, so that discouragement doesn't live there instead.

Interestingly, much of what I blog about is part of that refurnishing process, reminding me of His Character and His track record, renewing my mind. And, I think I'll go listen to that podcast once again.