Keep stepping towards the Water...

I have tried. I really have. And now I feel like giving up. I have reached out over and over again to an individual. She has not only spurned my overtures, she has been downright ugly about refusing them.

"You don't understand," she says. "You don't feel what I am feeling. You haven't lived where I am living now. You are happy and you don't understand."

I try. I listen. I make offers to spend time with her, take her places, do things together. I am rebuffed. Lunch? "No." Errands? "No." Sit-and-chat? "No."

I get scolded for not calling. I call. "You should have written me a note." I wrote a note. "You could have come by." I come by to visit. "I don't feel like talking."

This is hard. Now what???

It's as though I am standing in the lake, swimming deeper and deeper in God's Love, and she is determined to stay where she's always been. She's mad because her life is changing, because things are hard, and the Water seems to be retreating. "God does not hear my prayers." She's hurt that we don't stay beside her in the dried up lakebed and commiserate.

No. I will swim. I will roll in the Water, the Living Water. I will embrace the waves of Love that wash over me. I am floating in His Divine Embrace. I hit my own share of waves, I swallow too much brackish water... but I wait. I keep trying. I keep swimming.

Now I am in a place where I can not say or do anything. Everything I say or do is misconstrued. I don't retreat. But I don't go out of my way, either.

Each heart knows its own bitterness,
and no one else can share its joy.
Proverbs 14:10

"You don't understand," she says. "You don't feel what I am feeling. You haven't lived where I am living now. You are happy and you don't understand."

In a way, she is right. I have never lived where she is choosing to live now, though I've come close. A broken engagement. Hurts, pains and rejection in ministry. Family struggles. Not getting the job I wanted. Things that leave me gasping for air and thirsting for water... so I RUN back to God.

So much of what I will do in the future months and years will be to speak words of Water to the Thirsty...

Lord, I do not have much to offer. Just love. Your Love. May it overwhelm and nourish the broken...
AMEN...

"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."

From our home to yours...
Deb