Darn Near Perfect, a Way in the Wilderness

There are moments in life where you can just stop, look around and think, “Man, everything is just about perfect right now.” You know what I am talking about…you look around and you can’t help but smile. Your heart is happy and everything that is happening is good. All is right with the world. These seem to be very quick moments that you want to hold onto forever. Those are incredible and wonderful moments!

There are two things I now know about these said “perfect moments” that I have just realized in the last few days. Number one is that they are the sweetest when you are coming out of a bad few months or rough time in life. It is like you don’t know the exact moment, but stuff just got better and all of a sudden you see so clearly a perfect and wonderful moment where life is good again. It makes the all crap you went through worth it. Completely worth it.

I have two “perfect moment” experiences that I can remember from the last year. One of them came after a long and horrible healing process that followed an awful break-up. I struggled for over a year with trying to get over this man that I loved and cherished very deeply, but then lost for reasons I couldn’t understand. I struggled with sadness, anger, jealousy…the whole mess. Then spring break came and I went to New Orleans on a CRU hurricane relief trip. On the last day of the trip our group worked so hard and so diligently to finish gutting a house for a family that we’d met that morning and we did it! We stood by our ridiculously huge pile of trash and walked away that day feeling like we helped and loved someone. It felt so great to serve the Lord by serving people in need. That night a group of us went to Café Du Monde in New Orleans and this is where the moment happened. I was sitting around a table with my favorite people, in New Orleans after a sweet day of work, drinking hot chocolate and laughing…sounds cheesy, but it was so good! Amidst the laughter and powdered sugar I stopped and realized that at that very moment life was perfect. The place, the day, the people…I was blessed and loved by God and it was good. The guy I had been getting over all year was even there and I had this moment. That is God’s grace right there. There was also a new guy sitting next to me that I would soon be in a relationship with. That was a good moment…for sure.

Here it is...

The second perfect moment that I clearly saw happened just a few nights ago. This semester has sucked. I don’t know why or what specifically sucked, but it did. I went through some weird spiritual stuff and some weird relational stuff and there was just no reason for it other than God was doing a work in my life and it was some hard stuff to face. I felt dark and anxious inside and lacked a joy that I usually felt in my heart. I couldn’t shake it no matter what. I couldn’t find joy anywhere. So…in short…it was awful. The other night, though…a moment. I was on big group date night with a very special man and it was very enjoyable. We went to dinner and then ice skating in Kansas City. When all the couples got onto the ice skating rink most of us made our way to the middle and started being so cute. There was Christmas music playing, Christmas lights, and people just being fun. My date and I were twirling around and laughing and it was so good. To look around and see my friends being so fun and to see that for the first time in a long time the man I was with and I were truly enjoying each other, was an amazing moment. I felt joy and love…cheesy again, but so true. Life in that moment was perfect. My date even said to me, “This is like a New Orleans moment.” He felt it too.

This is really one of the only pictures of us from that night.

So, along time ago in this entry I said that there are two things I know about these perfect moments in life and here is the second one: God blesses us with these moments of joy and a healed heart, but he ultimately wants us to desire the sucky times that precede the perfect moments. It is during the bad times that he is shaping and perfecting us. He brings us to such a low point that we can’t help but to rely solely on Him. The other day in church our pastor referred to trying times in life as being times when we are “brought into the wilderness.” He said that God takes us into “the wilderness” where we have nothing and there he can begin to work on us and train us to be faithful. As humans we hate being in “the wilderness.” We resist it, want out so badly, and rejoice when we finally do leave that time. But you know what? Here is the kicker…while we freak out and want more than anything to not be in those awful times in the wilderness, Jesus continued to return there. He trusted God so much and had such a desire to be shaped and made to be just like his heavenly father, that he sought out times in the wilderness. Despite the discomfort and hardship that it brought, he knew that ultimately it was preparing him to be faithful.

That hit me. I hated this semester because it felt so bad. I love being joyful and I do seek out the joyful moments. I am not saying that the “perfect moments” in life are not good. They are a blessing and it is a time for you to really see how God got you through the wilderness. He promises to do that and so we should rejoice when we see that promise fulfilled in our lives. We shouldn’t be so resistant and scared of the other times though. We should always be ready and willing to go into the wilderness and trust that God is going to do something good there. Consider it joy my brothers, right?

When life is rough it is ok. We are where we are for a reason and God will not leave us in the wilderness with more than we can handle. He is preparing us to be faithful. He is bringing to light the things that hinder us from knowing Him better. It is painful and the darkenss often seems to have no end in sight, but be encouraged- there are so many perfect moments promised too! Life to the full!

I praise God that I got through this semester and I am so elated to have the majority of the trials it held past me. The other night when I was surrounded by friends and my heart felt nothing but joy in that one moment where I could say life was good again, I almost cried. God brought me through and I was so gracious. The good times that follow the bad show even more the sweetness of our maker. So now instead of clinging to that perfect moment and trying to hold onto it I need to embrace where God has me today and be willing to let Him continue to refine and purify me even if it hurts. He loves me and that will not change. God is in the wilderness and He is in the perfect moments. He just is.