Lotus Inspired
Lotus Inspired
BY PATLOC LINDA
There comes a time in your life when everything you touch, or everything associated with you goes wrong. In my diary, I call it my "winter season."
My winter season has not been easy. It has been marred by financial problems (as I was jobless, and I could not survive without any money), relationship problems, hunger, the deaths of loved ones, and loss. All this happened in one year--the year 2016!
I tasted pain, and not the pain of a wound, but that of the heart. When everything around you seems to fall apart. When you wake up in the middle of every night crying, but you have no shoulder to cry on because it seems that people only love those that have something to offer and those that have things going for them.
I lost a lot of friends, and I was lonely to the point that I craved death. I am an engineer, and I am currently studying for my doctorate. But going through all the suffering of my winter season after all the hard work I put in to achieve those things, almost made me believe that there was no God.
I almost took my own life.
I remember waking up on one of those days crying and not caring about a thing in the world. Not ready to face the day ahead, craving death - when one of my friends called. He had not called me in a year! It was like God sent him to talk to me.
After listening to what I was going through, he said this to me...
“God will take you to a position of pain, loss, embarrassment, confusion, and sadness until you get to the point of saying 'God, You are all that I have and need'; He does that when He no longer sees His reflection in you. Remember when God created us, it was in His image and for us to serve Him, when He looks at us He should see His reflection!”
It hurt to realize that the purpose of my life was not about my achievements or what I wanted, but it was about what God wanted.
Corrie Ten Boom once said, “you will never realize that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have."
I had friends who loved me because of my achievements and what they thought I had. However, when trouble creeped in, Christ was truly all I had and that is when I began studying Him in another dimension.
Our greatest weakness is that we tend to construct gods for ourselves and forget the real God who is responsible for our life.
We let our success be defined by what people expect from us instead of what God really wants from us or why He makes us wake up each day.
We always put what we want first before Him and forget what He wants, and when our plans fail, we blame Him. When we let Him have His way, nothing will worry us because we know that “He never leaves the work He began in us unfinished.”
I have learned to study nature whenever I find myself in the sin of doubting God, and the lotus flower has been my strongest inspiration.
A lotus flower has petals that bloom one by one, quite beautifully, in the darkest and thickest mud. In order for us to grow in wisdom, we need the mud of pain and suffering to mold us.
It’s so easy to talk about the goodness of God and not mean it when everything is easy and given to us on a silver platter.
In Exodus, God used ten plagues to free the Israelites when He could have used just one to prove how powerful He is (take note, each plague was meant to shame an Egyptian God!). He wanted the Egyptians to completely trust in His supremacy. In Exodus 14, the Israelites had escaped and God had taken them through the route of the Red Sea as the Egyptians pursued them, and they started murmuring against Moses. It was not an easy road.
We must know that God promised to take the Israelites to Canaan, but He never said that it was going to be easy.
Our journey in life is meant to portray the glory of God, not our own glory. God used the journey from Egypt to show His majesty!
In Exodus 14:15, God said to Moses, “Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward.” God knew about the sea; it was a route He had selected Himself. He knew what He was going to do in order to complete His work for the Israelites to reach the promised land.
We have to keep moving forward as long as we have entrusted our journey to God. We have to entrust an unknown journey to a known God! I am still in my winter season but now it’s better, not because things have changed, but I now have the peace of mind that comes from entrusting my future to a God who does not have the word impossible.
"With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26
Be lotus inspired! A lotus flower cannot be planted in marble. It is planted in the mud, but it never lets the mud stain its petals, and it has the most beautiful of petals.
Never let your problems dim your hope and destroy you, in fact, learn from them and let them strengthen you.
And above all, “keep moving forward." I am sure that He who began the work in you is ready to finish it! As long as He lets you see another day, then it means that He is not done with you yet! Take each day at a time and let each petal bloom separately, and quite beautifully, too, like the lotus flower.
Adopted from Linda’s journal, Nature Inspired
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