Even in the Wrestling

This post if from a journal entry I wrote several weeks ago (almost a month now). I had wanted to put it into a blog but struggled to find the words. Like I do with many of my blog posts. 

There is never a shortness of trials and hard circumstances here. Every day is another day where you have to fight to keep pressing on and pressing into God. I had recently been talking with a friend about how I was studying the old testament and for the first time I became very interested by the story of those in the old testament. About Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. She told me “that is so cool, one of the bible studies being done is on the life of Jacob for the fall at our church.” I immediately got excited because I had found particular interest in his Story. I found myself tearing apart chapter after chapter of his story and walking away from it with such insight and understanding. Studying the bible in a whole new way. It sparked something new in me.
I was like Jacob, I found myself wrestling with God. I wanted Him to give me answers, I wanted Him to pour out His blessing on me. I wasn’t going to let go and stop until He did. When I was surrounded by pain and heartache of those I knew. When I questioned my very purpose for being in Uganda. When I ran through the rain storm crying out to Him. I wrestled. I questioned whether His intentions were really good or not. As I wrestled with Him, His grip grew tighter and tighter. I found that the more I wrestled with Him the deeper my understanding of His character became and the more I desired to study His word. God met me in my moments of wrestling and frustration. But just like Jacob, I too walked away with a limb. I walked away with a deeper understanding of who He was but it came with a price. To see others the way God sees them, to witness pain like He does. To love others like He wants me to. All beautiful things but things that left me hurting in a new way.

God opened my eyes to see His heart for His people. The reason why I had felt so alone was because I was trying to make it through these hard things without Him. He showed me that my heart needed to be in a place willing to receive everything, even if it’s painful. He didn’t give me the easy answer I wanted but He showed up. He wanted me to trust Him. The kind of trust that Abraham had when the Lord asked him to give up his only son. I began to see that wrestling with God was what I needed to do in order to grow this unshakable blind faith.

God has been revealing so much to me. From when I met a friend who would share with me the promise of how God gives beauty for ashes. How sitting in someone else’s pain and heartache would bring me into my own healing and deeper trust. Taking my bitter and hard heart and bringing it back to life.

Sitting in the pain with others having to tell them that God is love, that He is good. In the midst of trying to show His character to others I found myself learning to believe it more and more for myself. I found that in the times I wrestle with God and throw up my fists in frustration He doesn’t give me an easy way out, I leave feeling broken and exhausted but I also leave with a deeper understanding of Him. He shows me who it is He wants me to be. I used to think that it was bad, to wrestle with God. To demand Him to show up. Yet, in my times of wrestling I have found God show up in bigger and better ways than I ever thought He could.

It would be this wrestling with God that would bring me back to a place where I wasn’t drowning when I would later suffer from an overwhelming amount of anxiety and stress. I found myself giving up because it became too hard but he would reach out and touch my heart and remind me to keep pressing in, to keep wrestling. To keep demanding Him to show up. He would remind me that even when the enemy would overwhelm me with circumstances of intense fear that I needed to keep fighting. To keep seeking Him. That even though I had forgotten how to He would bring my weary soul back to life,