"You're Bare"

 

 



A friend called and said, “Okay, what’s going on?” She had me on her heart for two days. Earlier in the week someone else called me and said they’d been praying for me against discouragement. It had been that kind of week. Those promptings that they prayed for me and had to connect with me mattered. They really mattered.

It has been a strange time and frankly, a struggle to know whether or not the things I have been doing mattered. Did the writing even matter? Disappointment and “discouragement,” the very word that the other had sensed, had come. My profession also had many doors shut this week that had previously seemed to be answers to meet our needs. Call after call, I received messages that clients have decided not to continue at this time.

I felt stripped. It all appeared to turn into nothing. The one who called asking me what was going on listened to me and she said, “You’re bare.”  That was the feeling. Stripped from every bit of labor I had made and hopes for fruit. It was humility. The humility of having nothing ahead: no harvest, so to speak. I did feel naked. If I were to ever receive anything, it was going have to be from the LORD. The reality that I can’t do anything on my own hit me hard. The passing away of someone this week in his height of ministry reminded me that nothing belongs to us. It’s all God’s and in God’s mercy and grace we receive. Every fruit from my labor would have to come from Him.

Farmers have experienced this. Their crops planted, tended and growing only to be destroyed by hail, or drought or flood. They stand there looking at all they had worked for, now gone and decide: do they put themselves out there and do this anymore or sell the farm and go onto something else?

The temptation came to go back to what I know I could do for myself. A way to cover myself like having more credentials in various areas to be considered a candidate to meet what man was requiring from me in order for me to succeed. I wanted a covering. Go back to school? I don’t know. This writing, what good was it?

But, I stopped. I can’t stop writing. I can’t stop sharing the things God places on my heart to share. I have to keep going through with it. It feels to me as if it were life itself.

The verse that had always been mysterious made sense to me all of a sudden. The mysterious young man who had been following Jesus and had been wearing a linen covering over his naked body, left it when the people came to take Jesus away and the young man fled naked.

Mark 14:51-52 ESV  And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, 52but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

He ran away bare, stripped and in Gill’s commentary it reads,” back to where he had originally come from.” When it got tough and he let go of what little covering he had; he fled. I had almost fled.

 Then, soon after, it says that Jesus was stripped. But, Jesus didn’t flee.

Matthew 27:28  And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him,

He stayed. He held up under the incredible difficulty of humility and persecution to death. He fulfilled what He was sent to do no matter how the King of kings was stripped bare and then mocked in a scarlet robe; the color of His precious blood. All that looked horrible and humiliating in God’s plan would reach its glorious fulfillment. Sin would be defeated and He would defeat death and live again. Glory would be known by His hand and His alone. No matter what man did, God would be known.

And so it is, sometimes continuing on leaves you naked, bare, but to flee the One from whom life comes from for my own covering hinders experiencing the fullness of all He is to be.  As one recommended later on to me, she said, “Praise.” 

Isaiah 61:3 KJV  To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.