The "White-Out"

God raises us like a father raises his children.  He wants us to mature, which requires knowledge and experiences, with wisdom sprinkled in amongst our days.  But God also keeps His loving eyes on our relationship with Him, and therefore brings us insight and understanding about His character and intentions, as well as our own.

Some of us are strong in listening and hear God well.  This makes for a closely-guided relationship.  However, the experiences can become stale and, well, sterile, if we do not apply God’s lessons from our own free will.  We do not grow more like God just by listening because knowledge alone can be applied in many ways.  His wisdom lets us know more about how to do what we’re doing, but just the doing of God’s will is not enough to mold us into His image.  We must let our hearts get involved.

God plans our lives so that we will not insulate our heart from Him, nor from our brothers and sisters.  Though it is imperative that we know when God is speaking to us, we must hear from the hearts of others as well.  When Jesus healed people we often read that it was because He was moved with compassion (Mt 14:14).  He was not His Father’s robot; Jesus was His Father’s image, heart and mind.

A few years back the Lord gave me a dream wherein I walked through a “white-out”.  This indicated an information shortage.  In the dream I was walking by faith, and not by what I saw, nor by what I heard.  And yet the Lord was with me.  When this “white-out” first came into my life, I didn’t like it.  I was used to knowing many things beforehand, and knowing why they were going to happen and what to do about them.  God had shown me how He saw things and imparted this knowledge to me in dreams for over 35 years . . . and then came the “white-out”.  I felt miserable, and abandoned.  Though I could listen and hear, it just wasn’t the same as receiving information in dreams.

At the close of the “white-out” the Lord spoke to me about this season of my life.  One of the things He did during the white-out was bring me into balance by causing me to depend more on scriptures, the Living Word.  The application of God’s word involved my own heart and was coupled by a close relationship with the Holy Spirit teaching me about God’s intentions in speaking what I was reading.   Also, during this time I grew closer to people, developing a deeper empathy for their problems.  I hadn’t realized how I’d let my prophetic gift separate me from people until the Lord removed the emphasis of prophetic dreams.  Though these dreams never disappeared altogether, God was at work, deepening my heart and nurturing our relationship through the Life that was in His written word.  That Life couldn’t help but to be touched by the lives of others.

God’s nature is vast and beyond knowing.  I doubt that any one of us could achieve perfection of His nature in this life time.  Yet we can trust our heavenly Father to bring into our lives just what we need to grow closer to Him and to His children.  Being in His image includes loving like He loved.  Many Christian self-help books would lead us to think that a “white-out” season occurs because we have sinned. Yet the very scriptures tell us that there is nothing that will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (see Romans 8:31-39). 

Let us remember that “those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rm 8:29).  We will be more and more in His image as we go through the different season God brings to our lives.  Trust in His love for you.  God walks with us through our “white-outs” and through each new season, working everything to our good according to His purpose (Rm 8:28).  Amen.