The Valley Experience
Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, but humility goes before honor. Proverbs 18:12
Have you ever gone through a ‘valley experience’? A valley experience usually is a time of great self-doubt, self-discouragement, and self-awareness. There’s usually a lot of ‘self’ in the valley—but not always… it does not need to be about self.
Growth occurs in the valley. Growth not of self, as in one’s own confidence but in a confidence in God. A confidence in God that comes through and during the valley experience. An experience that demonstrates the frailty of self, the cruelness, and the deception.
The human heart is deceptive and only the valley experience can break deception, break haughtiness, and bring humility and then honor.
God allows the valley experience because our ‘hearts are haughty.’ No one likes arrogance, not you, not I, and certainly not God. It is needful then for us to face the valley.
Yet in the valley God is there. We may not feel him. We may think that he’s abandoned us. We may from moment to moment believe some of the fluttering lies that cross our minds of God’s desertion. Yet they are lies—they prove the deception of our own hearts—yet God seems so silent, so far away…
It’s not God that’s moved away but our hearts. It’s not that God’s left us but He does desire us to seek him, to search for him, and to learn that life revolves around him and not around ‘self’.
God loves us and therefore he meets us in the valley and shows us that in the valley we grow and grow-up enough to recognize our full dependency not on self but on a loving and faithful God.
Have you ever gone through a ‘valley experience’? A valley experience usually is a time of great self-doubt, self-discouragement, and self-awareness. There’s usually a lot of ‘self’ in the valley—but not always… it does not need to be about self.
Growth occurs in the valley. Growth not of self, as in one’s own confidence but in a confidence in God. A confidence in God that comes through and during the valley experience. An experience that demonstrates the frailty of self, the cruelness, and the deception.
The human heart is deceptive and only the valley experience can break deception, break haughtiness, and bring humility and then honor.
God allows the valley experience because our ‘hearts are haughty.’ No one likes arrogance, not you, not I, and certainly not God. It is needful then for us to face the valley.
Yet in the valley God is there. We may not feel him. We may think that he’s abandoned us. We may from moment to moment believe some of the fluttering lies that cross our minds of God’s desertion. Yet they are lies—they prove the deception of our own hearts—yet God seems so silent, so far away…
It’s not God that’s moved away but our hearts. It’s not that God’s left us but He does desire us to seek him, to search for him, and to learn that life revolves around him and not around ‘self’.
God loves us and therefore he meets us in the valley and shows us that in the valley we grow and grow-up enough to recognize our full dependency not on self but on a loving and faithful God.
posted by Michael Byrd at 8:03 AM
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