Would you pray this humbling prayer?
“Mystify, arouse, and confuse me
Shatter all my plans and illusions,
That I might lose my way.
Don’t let me see the path or the light,
Until I am ready to be led
To the harbor of the poor and willing heart.”
These are the opening words to Kevin Prosch’s song, “Every Ray.” How well he understands the low the lintel of the human heart.
Humility is often the result of a humiliating process, as such.
Brokenness is part of life, but pain can lead to growth. Mike Mason described it this way in regard to marriage…
“One of the chief characteristics of love is that it asks for everything. There is no one who is not broken by this process. There is however an important difference between marriages that last and are good, and the ones that either break up or drag on in a state of unresolved tension and neurosis. Both must endure ruin, but the difference lies in the place of ruin. In the case of those who hang on to commitment, the ruin is in the palace of the ego. In the case of those who don’t, it can be the shipwreck of the soul.
“God helps us meet our match in marriage and takes enormous pleasure in married love. It is one of God’s most powerful secret weapons for the revolutionizing of the human heart.”[i]
Something dynamic can happen when we reach the end of ourselves. We may actually need God for a change. To live a pretext of the Christian life without truly reaching out to God is more than empty religion. It’s dangerous. We severely limit our spiritual development to rely solely on our own understanding. God wants us to bring Him our questions, doubts, struggles, and sins. Prayer should be an exercise in honesty.
I’ve felt trampled, betrayed. I have despaired the future. I’ve been acutely aware of failure or times when I let someone down. When I look back, those lowest times were the moments God made profound points of contact with me. In those seasons, He gave me dreams so deeply imprinted on my soul, they’re more real than memories. He highlighted scriptures that became lifetime verses for me. He surrounded me with His presence and once spoke my name as a way of saying, “Susan… I see you. I know what you are going through. I am here.”
God is sovereign over our brokenness and is actually drawn to it. Think of Hagar, shunned by Sarah and Abraham. Sent away for mocking Sarah in her barrenness, Hagar was pregnant and alone in the wilderness. God met her there and made promises to her about her future. And she said, “You are the God who sees me.”[ii]
In a larger sense, great outpourings of God’s presence correlate with times of brokenness in our nation—the Civil War, the Great Depression.
I can only imagine what God is doing to meet people in prison cells, in times of natural disasters, throughout war-torn places, and in the moments preceding death.
Still, when things are going well, it’s easy to forget God. Pride keeps us from knowing God in intimate ways.
Nebuchadnezzar, the greatest earthly king of his time, was at ease in his house and flourishing in his palace when God gave him a troubling dream. In the dream, an angelic watcher said the most magnificent tree in all the earth had to be chopped down. Daniel interpreted the king’s dream as a season of humbling for the king, where he would grovel like an animal for seven periods of time because of his pride.
A whole year passed. Then as the king strutted on his rooftop with boastful thoughts of his dominion, a voice came from heaven saying, “Your sovereignty has been removed from you.” Immediately, the king lived like a beast of the field for seven periods of time “until his hair had grown like eagles feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.”
But at the end of that period, his mind returned to him and he said, “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise, exalt, and honor the King of heaven, for all His works are true and His ways just, and He is able to humble those who walk in pride.”[iii]
Sadly, pride often leads to humiliation. Resisting God adds infinite misery to our troubles. But it doesn’t have to be that way… we can choose to humble ourselves before God.
“When there seems no remedy for darkness
Don’t fear to sink into it,
Let God reveal Himself in all things, through faith…
And trust is my gift back to you God.”[iv]
What feels like the end is often a beginning, when we go to God with empty pockets and open hands.
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[i] The Mystery of Marriage, by Mike Mason
[ii] Gen 16:13
[iii] The whole story in Daniel 4
[iv] “Every Ray” by Kevin Prosch, Palanquin, 2002 Forerunner Music.
