Coming


Gray and white PUMA hat pulled over my bronze-tinted aviators, I sat, back to the water and face to the bench I abandoned for the pavement. I didn't realize redness silently invaded my shoulders because ninety-five degrees felt more like a blissful coating than a crisper.

Lord, I am a sin-sick sinner in need of a Savior.

The dark wood reaching far beyond the balcony in the Oklahoman Baptist church still seemed before me. The pastor's powerful exegetical work in Psalms was affecting me deep, despite my joking claim to already have interned in church for seventeen years (pastor's kid perks).

The sick just need to come to the physician. They simply must come, and the physician is the one who then does the work to make them well.

Well, I know. I've grown up hearing this from camp-side fire and red-couch church basement youth group discussions. Well, I know, but what have I done? The pastor's prayer had echoed my verse, James 1:22: Lord, make us doers of your word and not hearers only.

Come, come.

(a u g u s t   t w e n t y   f i f t e e n)

Lord, I want to go for you.
Lord, I want to do anything and everything you want me to.
Lord, just show me. I am fully yours.

I wrote the words in the pink and yellow and blue and orange stripped journal as they had been the words filling pages since my eleven year old journals. Go, go.

(a u g u s t   t w e n t y   s i x t e e n)

ερχομαι | "to come, to go" in koine greek

The blue greek text book was all it took to make me a little blue at how much I still had to learn and yet how quickly I figured I'd forget it.

But my heart still pulsed: go, Lord, I need to go I need to do I need to be I need to find your will and do it with all that's in me.

The Bible, penned in koine, has the word, the word to go, so mustn't I? Better yet, shouldn't I have already?

(p r e   a u g u s t   t w e n t y   s e v e n t e e n)

But ερχομαι holds in it a dichotomy: a coming but yet a going. Post Oklahoma Baptist preacher, I was face to face with the sin that the Lord had already been tugging and showing me that was within. Good intentions? Likely, but also a lot of distrations of pride, jealously, and selfish ambition and a lack of faithfulness. I was caught needing to come, come.

To come straight to the Bible and to be a sin-sick (yes) but Savior-soaked sister in the process of sanctification.
To come straight to prayer to pour out my heart but also to be still and know He is God.
To come straight to praising and thanking Him no matter what I'm thinking of feeling.
To come straight to serving and to loving.
To come straight to Jesus.
Faithfully. 

To ever go, I must first come. To simply go into this day with the ability to love requires me first to come to the one who is love. To go and change the world requires me to come with my sin to the physician and plead for the change regardless of the pain of recovery.

Going requires coming (repeatedly).
Simple, so so simple.
But oh how simple to go (repeatedly) in my own strength and to miss it.
And to miss so much more.

So help me, Father.



© 2017 Deborah Hope Shining
(to comment, see red comment link below and to the right 
of "You Might Also Like" images)

0 comments

I definitely don't want this to be a monologue. What are your thoughts? Questions? Ideas?