Looking Close

Last week, I shared a post about looking for God in the midst of the hard times. I kind of wish I could write in this post, that I'm past the place I was when I wrote that post, but that's not true. I'm still in the middle of the time. And I'm being challenged with what I wrote.

Am I seeing the beauty of God in the midst of something that's still unresolved?

It's a lot harder than I wish it was. I wish it was something that begins to come naturally when we decide we're going to. But, it's not. It's still something we have to do every moment as we walk through the hard times.

Last night at a Bible study I'm part of we were talking about John 15 where Jesus says He is the true vine and we are the branches. In John 15:2, Jesus talks about us being pruned so that we can be even more fruitful. In the teaching last night, Lysa TerKeurst (the author of the study we've been doing, Finding I Am), talked about how a grape vine is pruned.

The prune a grape vine, the gardener has to get really close to the branch being pruned. It's not something done from a distance. It's something close and intimate.

As I've thought about it more, I've come to the conclusion that we often miss God in the midst of the hard times, because we're looking too far away for where He is. He's close in those hard times. And if we're looking in the distance, we miss Him, because we look right past where He is.

And so I'm learning in the midst of my own hard time to look closer when I look for God. To stop looking for Him in the distance and realize He's right there with me in the midst of it.