Day 3 : Far from the Good Samaritan

It’s almost 6 o’clock now on day three and I feel like I’m settling back into my own skin. Today reminded me that life happens around you and it is always a choice whether to turn it over to God. I felt like I was experiencing a greater depth of praise and worship today, I sang every song on the radio driving to work and felt every lyric as if it bursted from my own heart. I also ran smack dab into challenge after challenge. I don’t want to give the false impression that you go on a fast and birds start singing in the background and every burden you’ve carried suddenly disappears. I think it adds a certain gravity to your faith, so much so that when you have a bad day you ask yourself if you take as much joy in praying and worshipping Him as you do when He pours blessings on you. And my personal goal is to get to that point. I yearn to no longer hesitate spiritually, to reach past my circumstances and find myself in His hands. I have been so enamored with the practice of fasting, what will I look like and feel like if I am surrendering everything to God?, is this my body in an ultimate state of worship?, that I am convinced my bad day was a blessing in itself.  There was a woman who came to the church today and our pastor wasn’t in. She tried to push past me into the church when I opened the door and the best I could do was ask her to come back in 30 minutes hoping the pastor would be there.  She hadn’t showered probably in weeks and her spirit was very desperate and very greedy and the hardest part is I had nothing I could give her or help her with. I knew she couldn’t wait for the pastor inside because I have a history of letting people we’ve never seen come into church and I needed to be the one to tell her we couldn’t help but it broke my heart. This was someone God loved and Jesus died for and I politley asked them to step back out on to the street. I think this is the other side of ministry, feeling the hurt and the pain and coming to terms with the limitations of my own resources and in some cases, my own heart. I am deeply sorry I couldn’t be Jesus to that woman. I promise to pray for her tonight and have God lift her up when I know I have fallen short. I embrace the gravity of this faith, I feel the hurt and the loss that is not my own, and I accept that my heart will no longer be silent when I do nothing about it.

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