When You Need to Return
“And standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment” (Luke 7:38).
My daughter, you return with what you have. You lay yourself down, all of you, emptied. Because here, girl, in that posture, I make you clean.
You return to be cleansed, to be renewed. A return makes the choice to come back to a place where you were before. But to return to Me—you are not going back to the same place because I have made you new. I have turned you around. I have touched your face with my hand, my other hand on your heart.
And girl, you are not who you were before.
Then returning is beginning, not going back. Returning is breathing fresh air into stale, unused lungs. Returning is marking the place where I was and claiming the new heart I’ve given you. Returning is bending; it is kneeling; it is spreading yourself out, waiting to receive. In returning, your new eyes I give you show you the past with hope in the pain, light in the darkness, the little-girl-made-woman I have always loved and come to redeem again.
Stay here now, daughter, my adored one. I carry you now. I lift your head now. I let you bow low to be lifted high with new life. Believe returning is a re-turning—a reorienting, a readjusting, a revisualizing, a renewing. It is the revising of a story I’ve always seen, with a beginning and an end all the same.
New.
Return with Me, darling. Return to Me now.
|| More Resources For You ||
We hide from other people, hide from our true selves, hide from God. We’ve built bunkers over the years, as defenses for ourselves after we’ve made bad choices, or after we’ve had terrible things done to us. We convince ourselves it’s safe behind those walls. And years go by. And nothing changes—nothing except that we experience more isolation and more pain as we ignore our need for help, our desperation for healing, our desire for Jesus to shine His light where it feels so hopeless and sad and so dark. Can you name your wall? Are you ready for it to finally come down? Then join us on the Rush podcast as Justin and I discuss how to let Jesus heal your broken heart.
“Let Me help you remember Me. Let Me help you not just get through this day, but enjoy it—not because this day will or will not be easy. Not because there won’t be challenges to face, but because I am better than any problem. You can enjoy Me.” → Take a moment and let these words sit in your soul. What are they beginning to do inside you? If you feel your heart responding, I encourage you to go through the full FLAG devotional here (and pass it along to someone else you feel may benefit from it).
“I heard a busy mom of six make the comment: ‘I’m too busy not to pray!’ Her statement gripped my heart. I knew those words were God’s message to my soul. It was spiritual fervor—not spiritual laxity—that would cause me to thrive in the midst of difficulty. I began to take the phrase ‘too busy not to pray’ to heart and found pockets of time while rocking my children to sleep, while folding laundry or preparing meals, and while driving in my car to cry out to God in earnest, importunate prayer. My prayers became passionate instead of passive. And God began to pour supernatural strength and grace into my life as a result. I was no longer leaning on my own strength, but His. And it changed everything—not in my circumstances, but in my ability to respond to my circumstances triumphantly.” → From Leslie Ludy’s article, “Fervent: Part 1.” I love this because it reminds me that God doesn’t just hear the prayers we say in the quiet of our bedrooms. He hears the loud prayers in the spur of the moment, the silent yet desperate prayers in the busyness of life. He is here. Always here.
* Not signed up for Loop?
Get it today—it comes three times a week, free.
