Thriving vs Surviving

 I don’t see myself like I used to. Somewhere in the past few months, I grew to love myself. This is new for me too. It seems self-righteous, selfish, and stuck up. But it’s not. It’s freeing! One thing that has helped was to shut out outside sources. I dialed back my social media. I was honest with myself about my life. Honest about my sin. Honest about what I wanted. And honest to myself about areas that needed to change. And I was willing to work on most of them. It is very slow work. 

God sent Elijah to a cherith. I feel like He sent us to a cherith too. A hideaway with just us and God. Elijah just waited on God. I thought we had to decide what to do while in this cherith. I thought we had to be extremely productive and use this time to our advantage. Which we did to an extent. But where God sent us to be refined, I thought we had to work. But there were so many things I didn’t count on and so many things I didn’t know. 

I didn’t know how long it would take to get used to being here in this cherith. I didn’t know that while we, as a family were in this together, we were also in it individually. We were there for God to meet us as individuals. But that doesn’t mean we were thriving. In fact, for awhile, we were just surviving. It was not fun. I can’t even make up words to make surviving sound all flowy and Hallmark-y. Surviving is raw, hard, and ugly. It’s definitely not worthy of instagramming! 

But God isn’t the one putting pressures on us to always be thriving - we put pressures on ourselves - He knows sometimes we will just need to survive and He comes to attend to us. He sends his messengers to take care of us.

It’s can take days, weeks, months of just surviving to get down to admitting that we aren’t thriving. It’s actually ok to not be thriving. When you can admit that’s you’re not thriving, that is where God does the deep work of building faith, teaching our hearts, and removing the dross. Then we are able to see the beauty, life, and goodness He has been working in our lives.