I wanna Go Deeper, But I Dont Know How to Swim

Several days ago I woke up dissatisifed. Dissatisified with where I was with the Lord, dissatisfied with the status quo, dissatisfied with my level of discipleship, in short a lot of things. I began to pray that the Lord would take me deeper into His heart. 

This is a dangerous prayer, and God loves it when we pray dangerous prayers. Without a risk taking personality in the spiritual realm, there is a tendancy to get complacent really fast. Complacency is the opposite of growth.

There is no growth without pain. Let that mess up your theology; I know its messed with mine. Sometimes the most painful times in our lives, the times when we have more questions than answers, more doubts than solid truth, those are the times when in desperation we cry out to God and He hears us. He longs for that; the heart that is completely abandoned to whatever His heart is speaking. 

A thought thats been mulling around my head here recently: he put my heart inside my chest and taught it to beat a rythymn, and now my heart beats in time with the rythymn of His heart. 

It s a constant journey of aligning my heartbeat with His. And thats when I realize how off time I truly am. But its a beautiful thing. Its a beautifu lthing to be insufficient, because in my insufficiency, His glory shines the brighter. 

Let me give you a story of insufficiency. One that Ive been processing through the past few days. I think it was Sunday night after we were worshipping on the roof, several of us were hungry and decided to wander around Iquitos and find some street food. Not very far outside the door, we stumbled upon a blind man feeling his way through the street. Some bystanders told me that not only was he blind but he also couldnt speak.. this comes into play later on. No sooner had he said that than the guy out of the blue turned arou and started screaming in Spanish at me and matt. Keep in mind that up to this point we had been trying to speak to him and he had given us no indication that he could even hear us. It was very unnerving, and I instantly got the sense that this man was under the influence of demons. 

This was where both Matt and I came face to face with our insuffiency. I had never had a personal encounter with a demon possesed man before. Theoretically I knew what to do, but in practice, it became a whole new ball game. 

But in processing through this, the lyrics of the song that are my blog title popped into my head: I wanna go deeper but I dont know how to swim. Ive dived in head first, adn the Lord is in the process of teaching me to swim. I know theres so much more he wants me to walk in, so much depth that He wants to take me to. Sometimes half the battle is in learning to have grace for myself. 

God has all the grace in the world for me. But if I cant learn to have grace for myself, and by extension to project that grace onto others, than its worthless. Its like having a stick shift car sitting in your garage with no one explaining to you how to use the clutch. Sure you have the car, and all the driving potential in the world is right there. But unless you have the proper tools to work the gears its useless. 

I know that it might seem like the sotry i related ended in failure, but the Lord has been teaching me to redefine my terms of success. Sure nothign spectacualr happened, and we didnt confront the demon, but  for whatever reason we were there in that moment and were able to pray over him. So we continue to intercede for this man and I ask that anyone who reads this would do the same. 

I wanna go deeper, Lord teach me to swim.