I’ll get right to it.

Life is full of wrestling matches and rubble. Full of decisions, conquest, and wilderness.

Time chases all your steps in this life, all the while, sowing and reaping the goodness or the grief. These things don’t shake the meaning of life, but they do deepen our understanding of how badly we need heavenly grace.

Lately I have wrestled with myself and keep learning lessons of trust and glory and pain and love.

You may think God’s providence is cruelly distant or you are disappointing Him in the wheel spinning. So, we will be honest together. When we are stuck on this ledge, this cleft we must defy gravity to climb beyond, here and right here we will experience a quality control of sorts with our God. We look over and see Him with us, meeting His gaze while we know we doubt our struggles can be won. We feel breathless in our own humanity and our Lord knows it.

The Shepherd with His staff, the King and the train of His robe. The Man of Sorrows full of compassionate welcome. The Life and Light of men. Like apples of gold in settings of silver, He speaks:

Hope does not disappoint because the love of the Father has been poured out in your heart. Nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. (Romans 5 & 8)

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It is the love of God that keeps us. In our unbelief to see the other side of circumstance, His strength is made perfect in our weakness.

Do we think we are kept together in one piece on that cliff by our own merit? That we have not fallen because of our own grip? No. We are held by the strength of Love. We are fastened by the mercy we cried out for. The lamp unto our feet in these high places on the edge are lit with His word alone.

The place we keep finding ourselves in is the Needing Place. And it is always the enduring love of God that strengthens us back out into the life He calls us to live. A life with joy and fullness. One that certainly does have fiery arrows as we wage war in the heavenlies but is also provided with a complete armor as we do His will.

The Needing Place is our blindness to His faithfulness, yet we feel His arms around us. It is where His promise-letters capture our fear that we are voluntarily tangled in. The Needing Place is where we see a sunrise of triumph or hope but we don’t feel its warmth on our skin yet. This place is a very revisited place. It is a constant. We end up there, we walk straight into it, we crawl back out of it, we miss it, we ache to leave and finally learn… but friend, it is also where He always is.

The needs in life are the tethering back to His grace.

Read that again.

The place we think is a broken place is actually where He is putting us back together. His love will keep keeping us. The ledge will not always be an enemy. And difficulty will not always be the bread we eat. Soon the Needing Place will have all the needs met. In the meantime, don’t be ashamed to need the Father. To beg for His Son. To need the touch of His Spirit in your soul. Because needing can often lead to asking. And asking can often lead to greater than imagined results… and that leads to glory given back to a King.