My dear friend, Rachel tagged me for a meme, No Man’s Land. It could be subtitled, Lessons Learned In The Wilderness. Here is her introduction to the topic:

Ever feel like there’s no end in sight? I can remember countless times where I feel like I’ve set off for somewhere…. somewhere good and exciting and adventurous only to find myself staring at a seemingly never ending nothingness!

I call it getting stuck… and it seems like I have been there for a lot of my life. I, too, hate the void of the nothingness of having nothing to command my thoughts other than the oppressive painful, frustrating circumstances of what can seem like a wasted life or dream gone a rye. So, I talk to God about this quite a lot and here is what I hear:

It’s O.K! I feel like I am dying inside and he says it’s O.K! He reminds me of my favored son status that he has given me, of how my sin that I rehearse and turn in to self-hatred is not even on his radar screen, and of how he has gifted me for his purposes and how he is purposeful. Everything that really matters is O.K. and even better than O.K.

Let it go! The past haunts me. My sin, my failure, my deepest secrets, even the things other people perceive as failures, but really aren’t… it all haunts me. My circumstances of feeling like I have been stabbed in the back again and again, my wanting to find a place of belonging, but failing, my wanting to find a friend or someone who expresses confidence in me, but failing, are thoughts that have often consumed me. The being dissed over and over again by people who often are less informed or less capable that I and definitely less compassionate, feeds my victim mentality. None of this is of him and it wastes do much energy that could be devoted to pursuing God’s calling in my life! It must be left behind!

It’s up to you! I have this basic conviction that God gets blamed for way too much. I hear, the Lord closed the door and the Lord guided me, and I think, maybe. Sometimes he does. Sometimes things just get hard and we quit. Sometimes, I think he just wants us to work hard for what he places in our heart. If we have grown up with a lack of confidence or have believed the lies that others have told us about our inadequacies, it’s hard not to fall back into that mode. Maybe he just wants us to be bulldogs who pray, focus, and work tenaciously, ever fighting for the thing that he has given us because in so doing we are fighting for him!

Enjoy today! Yes, I am talking about enjoying a day in the middle of your stuckness because God is at work there, not just in a preparatory way, but in actuality. If you look for him, you will find him in your everyday. It might be in a laugh, a giggle of a child, a beautiful sunrise, your dog that is happy to see you, a moving scene in a movie, a new little place you found for dinner, a helpful sales person, whatever. He is there!

These are the realities that are anchored in truth and ultimately more real than the feelings we fight to come to these conclusions. As a matter of fact, if we weren’t in no man’s land, we probably would never grapple with these things and would never come to these conclusions in the first place. No man’s land just became God’s land, a place of goodness, growth, and grace!