So God and I, we had a really good conversation today :) It was about that nail you see pictured. I have a special place I go when I just want to hear the breeze and watch the bunnies and talk to God without interruption. Often times when I go to 'my place', I find a nail of some sort. The first time I saw a long, rusty, brown nail that was a little bent and twirked and kinda fat. That nail reminded me that the nail that went through Christs feet and hands was even bigger and wider and more gruesome to feel than that. Anyway, I've found a few not quite so interesting nails in my place before, but today, God made this twirly black nail ever so interesting.
At first, I looked at the nail and thought of how when it goes into something, the smooth pattern inside goes away and the curves and twists that are on the nail begin to form inside of whatever it's being drilled into. So the inside of it begins to look exactly like the dirty, twisted nail. I thought to myself how Satan is like that...he digs himself inside of us and eventually we begin to look just as terrible and messed up as he is. We have been formed into his likeness. And isn't that exactly the opposite of Whose likeness we'd like to be formed into?
Next, God brought to my thoughts the idea of how it tears and rips as it goes down. The further it goes down, the more it tears and rips. So I imagined this nail going through flesh, twisting and everything, and as it goes down it grabs piece by piece in different places and tears them off and pulls them down as it turns and it rips things from their origin and pushes them further and further under and before you know it, everything inside of where that nail has gone..is not only unrecognizable, but it's torn and scraped and bleeding. It is hurt, it is in so much more damage than before. The place where it now rests is numb. Now unable to feel the difference between pain and pleasure. It is just a painful filler for a hole that should be filled with something else. Imagine this as Satan driving himself through you, through your soul.
And why do we let him in in the first place? Because we have a little scrape at the surface that we want to be healed quickly. Maybe it's because we don't want anybody to see our broken flesh, we don't want anyone to think that we are able to be hurt like that. Maybe it's because we have a guard up and wouldn't want anyone to know we actually can be hurt. Or maybe it's just the simple fact that we were hurt, it doesn't feel good anymore, and we want to be whole again. We want it to feel better and for the pain to diminish. So, Satan comes along and makes a pleasing proposition as something we don't quite see as Satan. We see it as something nice and wonderful to fill our empty space and clean up our little scratch. So it sits on our scratch, we no longer feel the pain when it brushes up against something, because it's being covered. So it feels nice, having that pain disappear, and we look up and see that there's a whole lot more pleasure where that little shield came from. We look up and see the whole nail towering over us, but we see it as happiness and fun and pleasure, we don't see it as a dirty, twisted, black nail. So we ask it to keep comin', to keep fillin'. We figure that if it made that pain go away then why don't we just fill everything up with it and have a little extra! so it drives down and does it's thing, tearing and twisting as it does. Then we pull it out. And when we pull it out, there is a deep, gaping, damaged hole, ravaged by the prints of sin. If we dropped a pin down that whole, it would probably sound like a thousand oceans, crashing up against the rocks all at once.
I asked God to show me how that applied to me, and what I could compare it to for dynamic. And He revealed to me that, the more I try and fill myself with the praises of other people and the empty acceptance of humans, the deeper my hole will get, and the more torn it will become...for when I pull out all those empty praises, my heart will be hollow. I will realize how fleeting it all really was. I will want to fill it with the True Fulfiller and His pure, satisfying, true, everlasting, forever...love. I pray that you recognize your nail today, or take out the one that has already intruded.
Blessings, Katelyn
