My God Has Answered

I’ve retitled this blog with my first name—Lianna. The meaning is: “my God has answered.” My God has answered me from the depths, as the psalms indicate he will. He has answered me when light has seemed like a distant kind of peace. He has answered me when my mind is not seemingly willing to stay focused on the goodness that he brings, but only wrestles with the negatives that life can contain. He has answered me from the pit. My God has answered me.

Surely, when the floor feels the weight of my steps in the morning, I go to my God in prayer. And, before the lamp is switched to black for the evening, I attend to my thoughts before the living God. And , my God has answered me.

These days, the answers to my prayers feel to be freedom. You have the freedom to choose how to spend your time. You have the freedom to choose where your mind will be focused. You have the freedom to seek me. You have the freedom to rest. And, you have the freedom to know that my forgiveness is yours. You have freedom to pursue what brings you joy.

Naturally, my thoughts are regimented, and I can be strict with myself. So, I know that these thoughts of freedom are from the Lord. With him, I have a great kind of love—the kind of love that challenges, stretches, and also accepts. With him, I have that kind, and it is very great to me—a treasure. It’s a true love.

My God has answered. I hope that this space, this blog, can make evident that God answers prayers through the words that I type and that content that I share. I hope that it can become a space where my tears, longings, victories in the Lord, and musings find a home.

And, as I share how God is directing my steps, I hope that you are finding yourself agreeing—that you find yourself saying the same: “God has answered me. He has been faithful to me. He has given me that next piece of spiritual meat that I have needed—or that next helping of daily bread.” As for me, I am still longing—in so many ways—for spiritual milk. For, God has been showing me that my understanding of the faith, and especially of his grace, has been gravely immature. So, milk is what I seek.

I know that my God answers me because I am led, spiritually speaking, to where I never would otherwise go: freedom and grace. Freedom and grace. I have freedom from my self-imposed ideals about what I should be doing and who I should be to an acceptance of who I am and what I am doing. I have freedom to accept that, with the Lord directing my steps, I am where he wants me to be in this unexpected moment of time. I am on the course of grace—to keep accepting his gift of salvation. And, what he is doing in my life is good, despite it not having been born of my ideals.

You see, with my regimented thoughts and high standards, I have thought I would be quite farther along than I am. I thought I should be at a level of maturity that, with honest assessment, I simply do not meet. And, I have thought that I should have simply accomplished more with my life than I am accomplishing. But what if this is God’s plan—to show me how tenderly he nurses me in grace and how willingly he accepts me without my own ideals accomplished? I don’t claim to know his thoughts on the matter. I don’t claim to know his plans for me. But this I observe in my life: freedom and grace. Yes, perhaps these matter more to him than the accomplishment I could bring, than even my self-imposed dreams of maturity. Why? Because they are honest: I need greater personal freedom and a heightened awareness of his love.

In these themes, I find a great truth—God has answered me before I asked him a thing on these matters. He answered me strictly from my needs as he assessed them. And he answered me not according to my thoughts that would have pushed for maturity and accomplishment instead of acceptance of need. I am landed here instead—with freedom instead of striving in my days, and with the humble realization that a central tenet of the gospel (grace) is still foreign to my thinking so much of the time.

God has answered me—not only in the past when he has pulled me from darkness, and not only in the future when he will make me dwell in light eternal. He has answered me in the present when I surprisedly eat the spiritual meals that he sets before me.

In this space, I hope a description of those meals can find a home—post layered on top of post, thought on top of thought. For, I have found that I also have this freedom: the freedom to write—not as a more accomplished Christian, but presently as a nursing one.