Days Like This

Hosting these students has been the hardest thing I have ever been a part of. Emotionally, spiritually, physically I feel that we have been pouring our lives into them….only to see no fruit, hard hearts, more deceit, manipulations, and walls knocked down and then built up higher. There are many days when my head spins and spins trying to figure out how to climb out of their circles of lies and double-mindedness. There are many nights when I can’t sleep because my mind is filled with stress over their ways and my responses. I am easily fooled into their traps. I can’t decipher what is genuine and what is not. My spirit wars against so much of theirs. There are days when I sincerely from the bottom of my heart want to beg and plead with them to repent and change their ways. There are other days when I give up and wonder when the path of destruction they’ve chosen will catch up with them.

I could write 10 more pages on how drained, confused, lacking, defeated I feel in these moments. BUT, I would rather sing of God and how He is meeting me right where I am in this mess of broken, rebellious lives intertwined with ours. In the midst of days like this, I feel God’s presence so strongly. My heart wants to shout all day long about how good He is. I feel His light penetrating the darkness that we have opened up our home to. It is a mystery to me of how I can feel so depleted with these circumstances and yet so alive and satisfied in my soul at the same time.

The past few days I have been asking the Lord how He would encourage me to press on. He answered in a whisper. This is only a season. Only a season in a lifetime of moments. In the big picture this is such a small, small clip of days. This won’t last forever. I know that if I was in my right mind I would run in the opposite direction of them and their lives. But He reminds me daily that I am not in my right mind. I have a new mind in Christ. And because of Him I take another step closer to them.

This morning as I sat before the Lord I felt my heart turn to the Psalms. So, I flipped through them knowing that God was trying to point me to one. And I found it. I hope it encourages you today too, whatever season of life you find yourself in.

Psalm 63A psalm of David. When he was in the Desert of Judah.
1 O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.

2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
3 Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
4 I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
5 My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.

6 On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
7 Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
8 My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.

9 They who seek my life will be destroyed;
they will go down to the depths of the earth.
10 They will be given over to the sword
and become food for jackals.

11 But the king will rejoice in God;
all who swear by God's name will praise him,
while the mouths of liars will be silenced.