How my Pilgrimage surfaced my Doubts about God’s Love
Most
people who know me know that I see my true identity as God’s dearly beloved
daughter. Both of my children have
affirmed that I have taught them to see themselves this way. I have received countless notes from those I
have ministered to telling me that what they learned best from me was how to
love themselves as God’s dearly beloved child.
1 John 3:1 is my second favorite verse in the Bible. Look at how great a love the Father has given us that we should be
called God’s children. And we are! The reason the world does not know us is
that it didn’t know Him.
My pilgrimage opened my soul to perceive how far I have to go in living
out who I truly am as the dearly beloved daughter of God who I truly am. In spite of the fact that the Holy Spirit is
constantly telling me how much I am loved by God, I stray from His voice and am
tempted to listen to other voices. These
voices demand that I be loved by the world to prove my worth. People, places and things cannot give me the
love and respect my soul demands. I have
to stop listening to those voices if I have any hope of walking in my true
identity in Christ.
On
the Way of St. James Pilgrimage, each night our guide would have a meeting in
which he would let us know where to check in with him and where we would meet
for lunch. He offered warnings about passages
that might offer a challenge and gave us a set of expectations for the journey
ahead. One day he told us about an
obstacle we would face. He explained
that there are some ladies in a village who are fighting with each other, and
they are confusing the yellow arrows that guide the path. He told us specifically to ignore the arrows
and remain on the path we were walking.
As
we approached this path, there was a woman meeting pilgrims. She spoke in Spanish in a very excited manner
warning of trouble ahead. I couldn’t
understand her but some other pilgrims told us that she was trying to help us
and guide us to the right path, the one to the left. This triggered our memory of our leader’s
instructions. The only problem was that
we did not remember if he told us to go to the right or the left. We could not discern if this woman was truly
our friend or a liar. In the middle of
this chaos another woman came running down the path yelling liar in
Spanish. Now we were really
confused. Thankfully our leader had
caught up with us by then, and he told us the way to go in order to stay on the
path.
This
was an important spiritual lesson. There
are always liars calling out to us as if they are there to help. But in reality they are taking us along a
much harder and tiresome path. Any path
that leads us further from our true identity as dearly beloved children of God
will brings us to a dead end.
The
wonderful spiritual pathway I was journeying across did not make me immune from
the temptations of the enemy of my soul to see myself as less than a child of
God. I was tempted to demand that I be
treated in esteem by the world. I found
myself fighting for the respect I desired from the wrong places. When I stopped asking the world to give me
what I demanded, I allowed my soul to find rest in my true identity and began
to delight in any way I was treated. When I experienced rejection, it only
intensified the love of God in my soul.
I followed the path and stopped getting sidetracked by the liars that
enticed me to take a different way!
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2016. Deborah R Newman teatimeforyoursoul.com
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