Recreational Water // Hosea Week 10

recwater

Recreation// noun: the act of creating anew.


Recreational water is a nightmare. When you grow up in Florida and you don’t know how to swim, you feel like an alien in a land of attractive flip-flop ocean dwellers with sea-salt waves in their hair.

Yet there I was, agreeing to go on a complaint-free day at the lake with my friend.  And I was actually excited. The anomaly was so unexpected that I decided to embrace it.

We got in the car and soon realized we were going the opposite direction from the lake.

“Where are we going?” My friend leaned to the right to see what was going on.

“The doctor,” her mom said.

“Seriously? Can we not do that later? We want to get as much time at the lake before it gets cold.”

“No, we have to go today.”

Frustrated, we argued and pleaded with her mom that we could postpone the doctor’s appointment for another day. Twenty minutes later, we found ourselves in a sterile office where the water was used to keep people alive.

That day my friend was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes after a blood sugar level of 500 mg/dl. We did not go to the lake that day, and if we had, she would have most likely been in a coma. Though we were all so grateful that she was alive, it still felt like something was dying.

At 10 years old, she was (and still is) the strongest friend I had. But on that day I knew that she would not be able to rely on her strength anymore.


In the last Hosea study, we saw a glimpse of hope.

“Sow righteousness for yourselves,
reap the fruit of unfailing love,
and break up your unplowed ground;
for it is time to seek the Lord,
until he comes
and rains his righteousness on you.”

But after I read it, it still didn’t feel like hope. Even after Sarah said “repentance is not the end; it’s the beginning” I still didn’t feel it.

Something was dying.

I felt the decay that happened when they realized that the destruction is because they have “depended on their own strength.” Their strength was like the unplowed ground. It had to be broken, raked, unsettled, so that God’s strength could repair the land.

Yes, restoration was coming. But death was coming too.

Repentance hurts because there is an end to something. And I think that something is your strength. That something is you.

Our faith comes in when we realize that the new life that God will bring forth through the crumbling will be able to surpass our old selves, our old strength, our old deception.

If we give up the recreational waters of the lake for God’s raining righteousness upon us, we will discover the most perfect recreational water that exists. God wants to make us anew. He wants to be a resource of relaxation and enjoyment. He doesn’t want to see us in a coma, lacking even our own strength.

So He calls us back to Him, to lean on His strength, to be cleansed by His recreational water. With His prophets, He personifies grace. A grace which “races us to the Throne when we make haste to repent, and always outruns us.”

So bring on the rain.


 

 



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