I AM Esau...
I spent the majority of last week helping chaperone the students at our church to Student Life Camp at Samford University. It was like a homecoming. I spent four of the best years of my life there. To say that I am a proud alum would be a significant understatement. It was where I met my wife, where I found lifetime friends, where I learned how to study the bible in its original languages, and it was where I started growing into the man God wanted me to be. Camp was a great time of refreshing and renewal. The camp pastor for the week was Dave Rhodes, who is a phenomenal speaker. Upon returning home, I decided to see if Dave had any podcasts. As I was listening to one of his podcasts the other day, I felt like God hit me with a sledgehammer. Dave was speaking on the story of Esau selling Jacob his birthright for a bowl of soup. It was then and there that I realized…I AM Esau.
I spent the majority of last week helping chaperone the students at our church to Student Life Camp at Samford University. It was like a homecoming. I spent four of the best years of my life there. To say that I am a proud alum would be a significant understatement. It was where I met my wife, where I found lifetime friends, where I learned how to study the bible in its original languages, and it was where I started growing into the man God wanted me to be. Camp was a great time of refreshing and renewal. The camp pastor for the week was Dave Rhodes, who is a phenomenal speaker. Upon returning home, I decided to see if Dave had any podcasts. As I was listening to one of his podcasts the other day, I felt like God hit me with a sledgehammer. Dave was speaking on the story of Esau selling Jacob his birthright for a bowl of soup. It was then and there that I realized…I AM Esau.
I know that we've
all been through circumstances that seem overwhelming. I have been going through some of those since
the beginning of the year. Every one of
the circumstances I am in are things that happened that were beyond my
control. If I were a cynic, I would dare
say that I would have blamed God for the things that happened to me and my
family. However, as I began to evaluate
what might have brought these things on, I began to think about a prayer I
prayed four years ago when I was in South Africa. My wife and I had just spent the day in the town/village
of Sweetwater, which is one of the worst areas in South Africa that has been
ravaged by AIDS. We spent the day walking
from one house to another doing hospice care with one of the most amazing
women, Zanele. Zanele would get up every
day, go to the care center to pick up supplies (a month worth of food,
medicine, etc.) for the people she was going to visit that day (usually more
than 10 people). She would proceed to carry
said supplies (all of them at one time) as she walked from house to house to
minister to the community. Each house
she would visit, she would administer medicine, cook a meal, or do whatever was
needed. At the end of the visit, she
would pray for the patient and the family.
After my wife and I spent a day with her in the community, I came back
to the place we were staying and realized that I didn't think that God was big
enough to meet the needs of those I had seen that day.
Things changed for
me that day. I began asking God to
broaden my horizons. I prayed that God
would help me understand Him on a much deeper level. Upon returning home, I wanted to experience God as intimately as I
did in South Africa, but I knew that would be more challenging. With all the distractions of day
to day life, it is hard to maintain that level of focus and intimacy. So, I began to pray that God would give me
dependency on Him like I had never had before.
All I can say is be careful what you pray for, especially when it comes
to prayers that you know God will answer affirmatively. When I ask God for something like that and
mean it, it would be against His nature not to give me that request, because it
lines up with Scripture and His desires.
Little did I know what kind of journey that would set off.
For God to take me
to the place of closeness and intimacy I was longing for, there were a lot of
things that had to change in my life. As
I embarked on this journey of obedience and intimacy, the first few things that
had to die were hard, but they weren't life shattering or knee buckling. As the years passed on, the challenges
increased exponentially it seemed. This
year has been the most difficult of the whole process. Starting at the beginning of the year there
have been a chain of events that have rocked me to my core. I have begun to realize that there are things
that have been buried deep down in my heart that need to be uprooted. It is those things that have been buried for
years and years, decades even, that are the most difficult to remove. I am beginning to realize that the process of
being refined is not for the faint of heart, which brings me back to my
original point…I AM Esau.
As Dave Rhodes said
in the sermon I was listening to, "Esau traded his birthright for
breadcrumbs." He traded his
identity and future for the instant craving of what was before him. We do the same thing don’t we? It's hard to rely on God and wait on His
timing. We want what we want, and we
want it now. Dave said it best, "I
would rather satisfy my cravings than wait on God's best for me." This has been the challenge for me since
returning from South Africa. I continue
to settle for the breadcrumbs that the world offers instead of waiting for the
feast that God has been preparing for me.
You'd think that I would learn.
In that last few days, I have really been convicted of waiting for
however long it takes. In the song,
"The Lord Our God" by Kristian Stanfill, the bridge of the song says,
"We won't move without You."
This has been my prayer as of late.
I don't want to make any move or make any decision without God being in
it. My prayers have actually
changed. Now, I am asking God to keep me
attentive every moment of every day, because I don’t want to miss something
that He is trying to do. In doing so,
God is also reshaping my idea of what I think the outcome should be. This is yet another thing that we must all
die to…the idea that my definition of "good" and God's definition of
"good" are not the same. God's
definition of good is an intimate relationship with Him in which I am totally
dependent on Him for the next decision I make, the next step I take, and the
next breath I breathe. God wants me in a
place where it is just Him and myself and no one else, no other distractions,
no other noise. When I am in that place,
I am free. THAT is what I am longing for…now it's a question of if I have the
guts to take the steps necessary to get there!
I think that it's
time we all stop settling for breadcrumbs like Esau.
Let's wait patiently until God's calls us to His dinner table to feast!
Be God's