I started to read "The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life," by Hannah Whitall Smith yesterday. I've owned that book for at least 5 years and a ton of authors reference it in their books, but I had never taken the time to try to understand it until now (it was written in 1870, which is probably why I never gave it much of a chance). In one of the chapters, she talks about consecration and gives a wonderful example about it. Her explanation was that if a doctor was trying to cure a patient's illness, the patient would have to trust the doctor completely. It couldn't be that the patient isn't telling the doctor all of their symptoms or that they decide to take some, but not all, of the medications the doctor prescribes. The patient needs to tell the doctor everything that is going on in their body and follow all of the doctor's instructions in order to get better. Her main point was, "God must have the whole case put into His hands, and His directions must be implicitly followed." Not a little bit of it, not some of it, but ALL of it.
She goes on to explain how scared Christians are of giving everything over to God because they are afraid He'll make them miserable. She gave the example of a mother with her child and asked what it would look like if her child chose to obey everything that she asked of him because he trusted her completely. She asked the mom, "Would you say to yourself, 'Ah, now I shall have a chance to make Charley miserable. I will take away all his pleasures and compel him to do that which is impossible." The mom said she wouldn't say that at all because she loves her son and only wants the best for him. God wants the best for His children, even more than that mom wants the best for her son, and He would not do anything to harm us.
All of this made me think about the fact that something in my life always falls apart when I sing the words to "Take My Life" and truly mean them. Especially the phrase, "Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee." Even when I'm singing it, I realize that something bad is going to happen soon, but I know those are the times when I truly mean those words. That song came on my iPod last week as I was driving to Elizabeth City. I sang along with it wholeheartedly and T.J. broke up with me later that night. I've felt pretty upset about it, but I'm also very confident that God prepared me for what was going to happen by having me sing along with that song. He's showing me that all of this is because He loves me and wants to protect me.
As I've thought about it more, the areas in my life that need to be consecrated to the Lord are my love life, my jobs, finances, where I should live, and how I should be serving others. All of it needs to belong to Him and it does not belong in my hands anymore.
