He Delights In Me! An Introduction

As I started walking closer to the Lord and started getting better at accepting, believing in and recognizing His great love for me, I also began to see all the ways He delights in me!  His doting on me is sweeter than anything I can think of!  He knows my heart intimately - better than I know myself! - so He knows exactly what will delight my heart. He knows exactly what will speak to the deep corners of my heart that no one else can touch; He knows when to press me and test me and when to send me encouragement. He knows what things to send my way to fill my heart with joy so that I will continue to recognize that He is always with me!  If my heart is right with Him, He knows that I will smile or laugh with joy and respond to Him with gratitude. Though I should be devoted to being His servant anyway, God surely knows that my heart needs encouragement along the way.

Me & John Eldredge at Roanoke's 2010 Extraordinary Women's Conference

One of my favorite parts about the book Captivating by John & Stasi Eldredge is when they talk about how the woman is also made in the image of God (imago deo), just like the man, which means that her being/essence contains crucial traits of God. God placed some of His characteristics in man and others in woman, and before sin entered the picture, He intended for the two to go together perfectly just as they do in Him.  All women, from type A do-it-all-myself-career-valiant woman to the passive-needy-afraid-to-make-decisions-often-passionate woman, have an innate need to be delighted in!  Twirling skirts or out playing war games with the boys, all little girls want to know:  Am I lovely? Am I captivating? The longing to be seen.  "We are seeking an answer to our Question…Nearly all a woman does in her adult life is fueled by her longing to be delighted in, her longing to be beautiful, to be irreplaceable, to have her Question answered, “Yes!” (Captivating, p. 47)  In this sin-cursed world, most little girls have their hearts shattered with a big resounding "No" to this question by some crucial person or people at one or more points in their lives (sometimes by their father - one of the worst wounds of all; sometimes by their peers or friends; sometimes by their husband). We're left wounded, helpless, and groping in the darkness for answers...for something, anything to cling to.

And so, just as Eve failed to trust that the Lord was giving her the best and falling to the fear that God was "holding out on her," Eve took matters into her own hands. “Having forfeited our confidence in God, we believe that in order to have the life we want, we must take matters into our own hands. And we ache with an emptiness nothing seems able to fill.” (Captivating, p. 50)  We may profess faith in God in public, in church, or even to ourselves, but we don't truly believe in the redemption brought by the Lord Jesus Christ. We cling to surface-things that have an appearance of stability because we still don't trust that God has our best interest in mind. What a sad journey this leads down for so, so many women. I was one of those women. If I don't keep my mind devoted on God, "...bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ..." (2 Corinthians 10:5), then I can easily become one of those women again.

One of the things that helped me step out of that sad path was reading this book Captivating and discovering that my need to be captivating and delighted in comes directly from the Lord!  God needs and wants to be captivating and delighted in just like me!  He wants us to choose HIM!  This need was not intended to be enslaving or something that would bring so much shame as it does now. Many a woman's fear is that she is "too much and yet not enough" at the same time! (Captivating)  God is grieved daily over all of His children who choose to be captivated by something other than Him. God desires an intimate relationship with each of us and it wounds His heart when we give Him a big, resounding "No, I will not choose you."  Hearing this message from the book and really hearing it from the mouth of God is one of the many things that God used to turn my wayward heart back toward Him.  He was all too familiar with the wounds I'd received in my past and how much I'd held onto my bitterness and sorrow; He was keenly familiar with my compassionate, empathetic heart (it was He that gave it to me, after all!).  So, God knew that me hearing this message would be a key component in turning my empathetic heart to a better understanding of how earnestly God wanted to have a relationship with me and how determinedly He had been pursuing me.  I, and nothing/no one else, had been the barrier between me and a close, intimate relationship with God.

John speaking at the conference

As you see in the picture above, I was blessed to be able to meet John Eldredge in 2010 when I attended Roanoke's outstanding Extraordinary Women's Conference!  John was, of course, one of my favorite speakers of the weekend and I was only sad that his wife, Stasi, couldn't also be there!  They are a blessing to me through their obedience to Christ by writing Captivating and Wild at Heart. I recommend both books to both men and women; God has definitely provided a powerful message through these two servants of the Lord!

 
Oh how the Lord delights in me!  And I respond with, "thank you, Lord! what do you have to teach me today?"  For these things go hand-in-hand.  There is never a time when God is not walking with me (or carrying me, sometimes); there is never a time when God is not teaching me something; and there is never a time when God is not delighting in me!  Because He is always delighting in me, I almost always have something to share about it, so some of my blog posts may be brief descriptions of things that the Lord has used to delight my heart. Oftentimes, the Lord uses His Creation to delight in me because He knows how much I treasure it, so you may often see these posts referring to things in nature.  So that's it for my "introduction" on my "He Delights in Me" posts, but I'm going to do another blog post on some of the things that have delighted me recently!  God bless you!