Taking Stock, Seventeen Years Into My Faith in Christ

It's been seventeen years that I've been re-born in Christ.

And while the spiritual trek goes on, it emanates now more from a place of victory, not defeat.

When I first started out with Christ, in my distress I called upon the Lord (Psalm 18:6). The Lord answered, and over the course of years, set me in the spacious place of today (Psalm 18:19).

"He rescued me, because He delighted in me" (Psalm 18:19). 

He delights in me, and all Christians, because of Christ.

And that has caused laughter and joy to increasingly prevail as He has triumphed over all the ways I knowingly or unknowingly attempted to keep myself separate from God. 

Not that I am no longer a sinner, I am. 

But God's purifying Hand allows me to go forth having put past failures--and all the things that sin and flesh allowed to get under my skin during the last seventeen years--to bed. 

Despair and human fear have been assuaged, because 

"...I know that my Redeemer lives,

And at the last He will take His stand on earth" (Job 19:25). 

The surety of one's standing in Christ is not a place of pride; it is a place of utter contrition and gratefulness, of wisdom and love.

If I had to give an elevator-pitch synopsis of my faith walk thus far, I would go to Isaiah 6:5-8:

“Then I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined!

Because I am a man of unclean lips,

And I live among a people of unclean lips;

For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.’

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven.’

Then I heard the voice of the LORD, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ 

I, like Isaiah, began in woe, realizing I am a woman of unclean lips--in other words, a sinner. 

And then I struggled in the ensuing years of living among a people of unclean lips--in other words, sinners. 

God would take me through the ringer of testing, encouraging and teaching so that, not only would my eyes see my King for the first time, but would remain fixed on the King at all times. 

And in that school of Hard Knocks, as I like to call it, I discovered that the same refining process I've been through is still yet to come for many unrepentant and unbelieving people. 

And that is something I'm not going to change overnight, or possibly at all. But that's okay, because it isn't up to me. 

That doesn't mean I turn my back on the world, complacent. It means I turn to God expectant and trusting in Him alone.  

Notice how Isaiah simply says, "Here I am. Send me!" 

It's taken me seventeen years to finally figure that out. And not only that, but to be perfectly content with those five little words.

So that is how I will go forth. In the refined spacious place of sweetness and joy, of non-Quixotic compassion and clarity, and with no agenda or selfish ambition whatsoever of my own, I now simply say, "Here I am. Send me!"

copyright Barb Harwood

"...not having a righteousness of my own...but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already attained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:9, in part, through verse 14.

"Teach me Your way, Oh LORD;

I will walk in Your truth; 

Unite my heart to fear Your name.

I will give thanks to You, O Lord my God, with all my heart,

And will glorify Your name forever.

For your lovingkindness toward me is great,

And You have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol." Psalm 86:11-13