The Gray Tee-Shirt

God is
Good,
Beautiful,
Real,
And true.

But often God isn’t real to us. His presence doesn’t seem as real or comforting as a human smile or a hug. And sometimes the brutality of life convinces us that He isn’t good. A realization of just how many people in thousands of different cultures center their lives and hopes on a completely different God can undercut our assurance that ‘we know Him truly’. His beauty can be so scarcely seen that it is hard to keep its memory alive. I always seem to lose God in little pieces, just like how people fade out of your life when they die. After their room is clean, you peek your head in and know that their desk will never be tossed about as it became when they would get lost in their work. Their smell fades out of their clothes, the bed, the curtains. No matter how deeply you long to bury your face into their favorite gray tee-shirt and breathe them in, it is silently and forever gone. Their mail stops coming. You don’t see their handwriting anymore on little notes or grocery lists. Evidence of their existence in your daily life fades on the outside and pools into your heart where it evaporates quickly and is gone. When the mark of God on you grows faint, and He doesn’t seem active in your life, it is easy to lose heart and faith.

Whether God seems recently distant in a believer’s life, or if a person has never known Him before, there are two distinct responses when we don’t acknowledge the transcendental nature and activity of God in our lives. And that’s what the next several posts will be about. We’ve already looked at why it’s important to be intentional about having a depth of feminine character, and how a lot of the confidence to be the woman you long to be comes from having your identity’s foundations in God’s pursuit of you. This next section will look at how our hearts respond to God and what that has to do with becoming women of beauty and strength.