On A Journey Home

These days, I’ve been spending a lot of time laying on my floor. With worship music on and the glow of the Christmas lights from my tree that’s still up, my dark laminate wooden floor has seen a lot more of my back lately.

Yes, my tree is still up, because I love the peace those lights continue to bring to my house each morning and evening. It continues to stand tall because, these days, I need peace. I need it to overflow all around me. It’s my constant prayer as I lay arms out on the floor, “Jesus, bring it all to peace.”

This season has been one of fire.

Often we think of seasons in terms of a few months because that’s our experience with them, right? Summer, fall, winter, spring—seasons that are here for a while and then gone. But this “season” has been years. Years of feeling in the fire. Years of holding so many things in tension and trying to learn to keep moving forward in spite of every hard or exhausting thing around us that we don’t understand.

The demands of life and others gets loud. Deafening some days. The pace of it all tends to feel fast or chaotic, and sometimes—often times—there are things swirling around us that are beyond our control leaving us to react more than we care to. Fire.

Yet as the season continues to swirl around me, I’m thankful for that space on the floor to lay, and I’m grateful for a Father who calls me there. I’m thankful for a place to stop and just be, to cry out and say “Jesus, bring it all to peace!” I’m thankful for a season that has taught me more about who the Father is and what He sounds like, so that I KNOW HIS VOICE and can disregard the voice of the enemy each time he comes because I know my Father’s voice. I know the kinds of things He says.

Just as these have been years of fire, they have been years of learning to walk with deeper faith and somehow finding greater peace in the midst of things that don’t make sense for me to have peace in. It’s that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talked about in his letter to the believers of Philippi in Philippians 4:7. And it’s the peace that the prophet Isaiah talked about in one of his songs of praise in Isaiah 26:3-4.

And these days as I’ve continued to cry out for “peace over it all,” there’s a song I’ve kept on repeat while I lay there on the floor.

There is another in the fire
Standing next to me
There is another in the waters
Holding back the seas
And should I ever need reminding
What power sets me free
There is a grave that holds no body
And now that power lives in me
(Another in the Fire, Peace, Vol. 2, Bethe Music & Bethany Wohrle)

This season may be fire, and there may be plenty of days when sheer exhaustion leaves me wishing for a different season, but if the fire is where the Lord forges something deeper between me and Him, if the fire gets to also be this place where I get to know Him more, see Him more, hear Him more, then I want fire. I want the confidence and strength that fire brings. I want the truth and new perspective that fire brings. I want the deep trust and layed-out-flat moments with the Lord where I know that, more than anything, I just need Him. If that’s what fire continues to bring, then Father, keep calling me into the fire. Because I know that’s where You’ll be.

“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast,
because they trust in You.
Trust in the LORD forever,
for the LORD, the LORD himself, is the Rock eternal.”
-Isaiah 26:3-4