Breaking Through

By Ron van der Veen

When I started on my listening prayer journey, I heard about how God often uses images to speak to us.  Since I'm such a hyper-visual guy, I felt left out and wondered why He wasn't communicating with me in this manner. I asked God about this and, after waiting a few days, He gave me His answer. 

Over the last several months God has begun to open up a dialog with me through  images He brings to my attention.  A few weeks ago I was going down this really ugly stretch of freeway and asked God if He would show me anything beautiful about it.  Then I saw this weed growing through a crack in the asphalt.  At first I thought nothing of it, but was beginning to understand that I needed to pay more attention to things like this.  What struck me was the contrast between the cold massive heartless feel of the asphalt and concrete, and the fragile green life of this emerging little plant.  I couldn't get it out of my mind, so I asked God if there was anything He wanted to say to me about the weed that was growing through the asphalt on the freeway. 

He told me that His love and healing is a lot like this seemingly insignificant plant.  The asphalt is when we seek to deny and bury our wounds rather than embrace the pain that might permit His true life to break into us.  We asphalt over our pained hearts with denial, bitterness, lust, and even seek to medicate our pain rather than feel it. In the midst of our brokenness, God's wants His love to break through to us just like the weeds find their way through the tiny cracks in the asphalt.  They cannot not come alive, and when they break through they add beauty to these otherwise dark places in our hearts.  Even the most broken people have cracks where God yearns to shine the light of His healing presence. Only an act of our will can keep Gods' love from breaking through these cracks where He yearns to shine His beauty. 

"So David went to Baal-perazim and defeated the Philistines there. 'The Lord did it!' David exclaimed. 'He burst through my enemies like a raging flood!' So he named that place Baal-perazim (which means 'the Lord who bursts through')" {From 2 Samuel 5:20 NLT}. 

Think about that next time you use Weed be Gone on your sidewalk!!!!  

BREAKING THROUGH by Jeremy Riddle

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