Tuesday, November 18th, 2003 - Hezekiah Week

I have to start by saying that God is amazing. Completely awesome! My face remains forever rocked off by him. I am still learning many things that God is teaching me through my experiences in the last week - my "Hezekiah Week." As usual, I have to let you know the background info; Hezekiah's story is told in 2 Kings 18 - 2 Kings 20.

Hezekiah was a king in Judah who strongly trusted and put faith in God (2 Kings 18:5-6). The king of Assyria came and invaded Judah, threatening all of the people outside the walls of Jerusalem to surrender or be killed in a siege of the city. Hezekiah's response to the threat is to offer him all the gold and silver from the Lord's Temple. The Assyrian king takes all the treasure, but still threatens to take the city of Jerusalem if the people will not surrender.

This time, Hezekiah takes his burden to God, praying and seeking God's strength and will for him (since the army of Judah couldn't come close to matching up to the Assyrian army). God is completely faithful and saves Jerusalem from the Assyrians by sending an angel to wipe out 185,000 of them. If that isn't faithfulness, then I don't know what is. Hezekiah went on to be continually prosperous because he trusted God in all that he did.

I read this story today and just this story in these three chapters, and I am blown away by how it so directly parallels the last 5 days or so for me. I was confronted with a big struggle, and I tried to deal with it by my own strength and my own thoughts of a good solution to the problem. That completely blew up in my face, and I had a rough couple of days before I finally took my burden to God and let Him show me how to take care of it.

The underlying idea that God's showing me seems so simple. Trust God and be faithful to Him, relying on Him and not ourselves, and He will be abundantly faithful back to us. There are even times when it is easy to be completely faithful and trusting to God, but for some reason there are those times when it seems so much more difficult to actually put it into practice. I am so thankful that God is building me in that trust further through my recent experience.

I took all this to God yesterday afternoon and enjoyed a great night of worshiping Him and praying after that. My day today was completely transformed because of it; God's power to flip a situation around never ceases to strike me with awe. I woke up at 6:45 a.m., studied and then went to 8:00 test, showered, went to 9:30 class, ate, studied and went to 12:00 test, went to 2:00 class at 1:00 only to realize that I was an hour early, enjoyed an hour of relaxation, went to 2:00 class, then had the awesome time with God where He showed me this whole Hezekiah thing.

Throughout the whole day, I have been filled with joy being in God's presence through this unusually active day for me. I have these random urges to call people up just to say that I love them, and I love feeling like that. I feel giddy like when you learn to ride a bike, and you finally get it without mom or dad holding on to the bike, and in your excitement you take a huge fall or crash into something obvious like a wall, but don't even care that you're bleeding everywhere and bawling your head off because you finally did it! Yes, for me that was a good feeling. :)

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