Beautiful Inheritance {Peniel}
In March 2017, Hope Moms from all across the country, and even from across the globe, gathered in Giddings, TX for the annual Hope Mommies Retreat. Together, they spent the weekend sharing the stories of their precious babies, and finding that Christ can indeed comfort the brokenhearted, often through the hands and tears of another sufferer along the way. The theme of the 2017 retreat was “A Beautiful Inheritance.” In this mini series, Shannon Owen, recaps her messages from the retreat in order to give us a greater picture of the beautiful inheritance we have been given in Christ.
I like the Psalms because they are honest. Theyre joy and pain and longing and grief and anger and worshipall mixed up and raw, just like our hearts.
In college, I took a poetry classI had been writing angsty poetry in a cool-looking journal since high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing. Turns out, I was pretty terrible. The problem was that my goal in writing was to share something kind of obscure and then spin it into something nice and happy. Because I thought thats what Christians were supposed to be. Nice and happy. After getting paper after paper back with more red pen on it than my actual writing, I went in to see this professora non-Christian at a very liberal school, by the wayto ask why he didnt like my writing. He knew my faith, so he told me to pull a Bible off his shelf and open it to Psalms. He said, This is the only part of the Bible I read. Because its honest. Write like that.
It was a watershed moment for my writing and also for my soul. Pretending really doesnt get you anywhere. We have to start honest and let God do some work.
In Psalm 16, David starts with a tone of urgency. He writes, Protect me, God, for I take refuge in You. He is not asking protection; he demands it as only a child of God can. Its in the heartbreak moments, the raw moments, that I pray like DavidI pray the guttural, desperate prayer of a wanderer in the wilderness.
The title of Psalm 16 in some Bibles is Confidence in the LORD. Because overall, the Psalm paints God as supremethe most wise, the most powerful, the most valuable. BUT: you can tell these descriptions of God didnt come from a list of nice things to say about God in order to sound spiritual.
One translation of the Bible titles this Psalm You Will Not Abandon My Soul. Personally, I like that better because this Psalm takes the tone of someone who has struggled through something and KNOWS first-hand who God is.
Ive experienced things that have broken and filled my mama heart, and stretched it in ways I didnt know it could really stretch. I know tubes and hospitals and fear and that feeling of being thrown somewhere you dont want to be. God has said yes, and He has said noand Ive wondered whether he is good. And I know that even in the middle of pain for your babiesone of the most keenly felt kinds of pain, I thinkHe is Father. He is good. And, He is renewer of all things.
The theme of the 2017 retreat was A Beautiful Inheritance, which is taken straight from this Psalm. But I know a lot of you have honest questions running through your heads. It might be hard for you to call God wise and valuable right now. So, lets take the idea of inheritance and start at the beginning.
In Genesis 32, Jacob stands on the threshold of the Promised Landit was the inheritance promised by God to Abraham, Jacobs grandfather.
Its a strange storyJacob came to the Promised Land with an entire entourage of people. He was surrounded by family, but he meets God and spends the night wrestling with Him.
The strangest part about this story is the way the wrestling begins. Jacob wasnt laying hold of God to get something from him; God was the aggressor and, after wrestling all night, strikes his hip.
It feels like that sometimeslike God is hurting us. To be clear, God does not relish our pain. And the break moment isnt always the death itself. Its the moment that grief opens up like a floodgate and threatens to overwhelm us.
But, until God breaks us, we think we are in control. That God sits in the sky, a benevolent grandfather who just wants our attention & is grateful when we deign to give it to him. NO. Our God is a lion; He is the power of the mountains and the vastness of the oceans. He is the glory of the sun.
So, broken Jacob clings & asks for a blessing; God asks his name. Jacob means wrestler, displacer, schemer. Before he could move forward, Jacob had to acknowledge who he was. God blesses us when we cling to Him in our brokenness. Again, God does not enjoy our pain. But, He loves when we cling to Him, when we lean into Him and acknowledge our weakness BECAUSE thats when He shows His strength, power & glory. Thats when He infuses us with boldness.
Jacob asks for a blessing and he gets a new name. He already has the inheritance, but its here where he BECOMES Israel, which means God fights.
And with a new identity, Jacob names the place. It isnt until later that Jacob realizes hes seen God. Like Jacob, we arent great at realizing whats happening or what God is doing in the moment that He does it.
Jacob names the place Peniel to remember it. We dont get over our grief. We dont go back to being the same person we were before. Ever. But, we mark the place where God broke us and gave us a new namewhere He changed us into a new person.
I hope that you wrestle. That God grabs you not-so-subtly and works something into you. Were going to talk about inheritance in this series because, even when He allows the broken things in our lives, the fact that we have an inheritance means that God is for us.
And He is the one that heals. The question we have to ask ourselves, and the question we are going to wrestle with is this: Do you truly believe that what God has for you is GOOD?
Shannon Owen lives in Houston, Texas with her husband, Lee, and their two girls, Avery (6) and Kate (2). In 2012, between her two girls, she miscarried a baby at 8 weeks due to an ectopic pregnancy; read more from Shannon about her Hope Baby here. She taught high school English, but traded in her grammar textbooks for board books after Avery was born. However, words and stories are still very much a part of her life.
During a lengthy NICU stay after her daughter Kate was born, Shannon dusted off her pen and started a blog to keep friends and family updated on Kates progress, but kept writing because it was catharsis. Kate was born with a congenital, non-progressive muscle and joint disorder as well as bilateral vocal cord paralysis, which causes a blockage in her airway.
Shannon also writes for Abide, an audio prayer app, and has had some of her reading plans featured on YouVersion. You can find her at shannonowenblogs.com.
Shannon and her family are very involved in their church, Houstons First Baptist. Shannon and Lee help teach high school juniors and seniors, and Shannon leads and teaches in the womens ministry.
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