Looking back to the very first post in this blog, I can see that I've chronicled a pretty productive 12 months. It's amazing what a difference a year can make. This time in 2011, I was rounding up the most difficult year of my life. It was a year where God did some very deep ploughing in my heart. I didn't understand it and, in my own childish perspective, could only focus on the immediate pain of my circumstances. But God always knows what He's doing. He used and directed the most difficult circumstances of my most difficult year to break through the Great Wall of China that I had built around my heart.
The following is a poem that I wrote a few months ago that may (or may not) shed a little light on what I'm talking about:
Despite me you have restored me
You have poured into me this spring of life
That wets my tongue parched by the dry heat of the world,
So that I can sing your praises
Trapped in a chain of lies disguised by reason
I ran away from your plan
Away from your hand that had committed treason against my logic
Whispers of the enemy grew louder
And I cradled them for comfort
In my arms they burned me,
They turned me into an enemy of myself
Wearing the armor of worthless of victim of hopeless and of hell.
In my self righteous rage I called out to you from my cage of fire
And you answered.
Protected and covered in your blood
you dragged me through the part of hell that was hot enough to melt away the chain around my heart
The chain that was tearing me apart, causing my soul to sputter and choke
And In your arms we left that terrible place
On our skin not even a trace
of smoke lingers
My sin, once again, crossed out by the one that the cross tells about
You broke into my heart to get me out of the pit
bit by bit you're still tearing down walls,
preparing me to heed the calls of others
still stuck in the muck and stuck in the mire,
hearts burning with the fire of pain and dispair
instead of burning with the love and hope
that comes from knowing you are there
You have used the flames of the enemy to melt the chains of the chosen
The eyes of my heart, once frozen in an eternal winter, have been warmed and melted into spring.
Finally it is learning to sing the song of glory for the one who has transformed my story of pain into a weapon that can take down giants.
Though I stumble and falter through each day
Your way is clear to me now, even in the shadow of death.
Where there once was a chain constricting the flow of your blood to my heart,
there is now only air.
For the chain, like death, has been defeated.
It is not there.
2012 was the first year that I entered with a "chainless" heart. How could it not have been a year of dreams?
And I have decided not to put a time limit on Dreams. I have decided to Dare to Keep Dreaming in 2013. I've got a sneaky feeling that this adventure that I have been put on has only just begun. I don't know what God has in store, but I'm excited for the journey.
See you in the Misty Mountains of 2013!
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