Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: RELEASE (08/02/18)
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TITLE: My Enough | Previous Challenge Entry
By Linda Lawrence
08/08/18 -
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My husband served God with a workaholic passion; he was faithful to me, never looking at other women; he was an adoring, attentive, sacrificial father to our children; he asked for very little from me; his paycheck was our paycheck; he appreciated whatever meal I set before him and the clean clothes he didn’t have to think about. He kept the car filled with gas. He told me that was his way of saying “I love you.” And there I sat, in the car, sobbing, “It’s not enough! It’s not enough!”
I will be enough if you will let Me, the Lord whispered to my soul. But I want flesh and blood! I want to have the kind of conversations with my husband that I have with my closest friend. I want him to know me! I want to know him, what he is thinking, what he is feeling! I want a oneness with him that I thought marriage was all about. I am so lonely when I am with him. We’ve been married almost twenty years. Is this as good as it gets? It’s not enough! No, it’s not enough. . .
Let Me be your enough, the Lord whispered, offering comfort that I wanted from my husband, my flesh and blood husband. I know you. I want you to know Me as I know you. I want to listen to you and share My thoughts with you. I want intimacy with you as much as you want intimacy with your husband. I created you for intimacy with Me, but you are expecting your husband to be your enough. He can’t, any more than you can be enough for him. I AM Enough. But you can never enjoy My being enough while you cling to the desire for your husband to be everything you need. Will you let that expectation go, so I can fill that place of disappointment?
The steering wheel became my altar as I tearfully released into the hands of the Lord my girlish, romanticized, daydreams of feeling known and cherished. I know He knows me better than I know myself. And I know He wants me to know Him. Still, I must confess I felt I was being asked to settle for second best. In giving up my desire for being my husband’s highest priority, I thought I gave the Lord something very precious. Little did I yet truly understand.
In the following years there were other messy scenes of my falling into a pit of craving and yearning, wanting more than a faithful marriage. I then stomped on long walks with the Lord, pouring out my complaints - again. But thankfully each of those walks ended in the Lord, powerfully yet tenderly, helping me to relinquish another misplaced hope and expectation.
My husband and I also had lots of practice forgiving each other for our inability to meet each other’s expectations. I don’t think he was very aware of my struggles and I didn’t understand his. When he retired I secretly expected to finally be the focus of his attention, but he had his own struggles with wanting more. Losing his identity in the public eye was as painful for him as my not being the apple of his eye was for me. Instead of this drawing us closer, it revealed the distance in our understanding of each other.
The Lord was patient with me, though, so much more than I was with Him. I had wanted Enough from Him immediately but even that relationship takes time to build. However, as my husband’s life drew to an end, more and more we both realized how satisfying it was to know we were loved and cherished by our Lord.
Now that my husband of more than 50 years is gone, and I can no longer expect anything of him, I am experiencing great joy in finding the Lord to be more than Enough. Why did I wait so long to let go?
For then . . . face to face. . . then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:12
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