Off on a New Adventure!

A path through the woods
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Hello, everyone!

Brief Update

It has been forever since I last posted anything.  Before I dive into this brief post, I just wanted to give all y’all an update on what has happened in the two and one-half years (I know, shame on me) since I last posted.  Well, between then and now, I finished nursing school and I took my first job as a nurse in Cardiac/Cardiac Surgery ICU, of all places.  I continued to working there for about eight months until my new adventure needed to began.

I moved back to Oregon from Florida to be with my parents and help take care of my dad who has been dealing with a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

In early February, after a conversation with my parents, I knew that I needed to be back with them.  So, I turned in my two-week notice at work, packed up my car, and drove 3,600 miles across the country to arrive back in the Eugene area.

Life in the Wilderness

It has been over six months now since I’ve been back helping them out and it has been one of the most difficult times of my life.  Having to move away from the community of people that love Jesus more than I had experienced before, whom I had lived with for the last five years, and moving willingly to be with a terminally ill family member, I have been led into a time in the wilderness.  Like the people of Israel, the realities of everything that I have seen of the Lord are been put to the test and the rubber is meeting the road, spiritually speaking.

Basically, I have been forced to ask the questions:

Is Jesus really everything to me? Is He really my all in all? Is He enough?

As painful as it is for me to admit it, for all my words and my actions, this time of being in Oregon has shown me that Jesus hasn’t been everything to me.  While that may be the case, by the Lord’s grace, I have been caused to press into Him and to rely on His Life, learning to abide and trust in my Lord, as I have never done before.

An entry from Bill Freedman’s The Supplied Life sums up my time here so far pretty well:

“And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.” Deuteronomy 8:2-3
When the Lord said, “to humble you and test you,” He meant “to measure you.” When He said, “to know what was in your heart,” He meant that in their hearts, the children of Israel would discover murmuring and rebellion manifesting itself. They would find themselves coming short of God’s standard. In other words, all their negative reactions to their environment were allowed by God to escort them to live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
The fact that the Lord allowed them to hunger and then fed them with manna signifies that they were pushed beyond their capacity in order that they would be escorted to eat divine food. Not to “live by bread alone” meant not to live by the natural life, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. In the wilderness, God was seeking to escort them to Himself, to learn to live by Him as their source and supply. In the same way, God humbles us through environments that we cannot cope with. It is at those junctures that we need to quickly recognize our escort! The feelings of not being able to cope are the escort. Our escorts leading us to Christ come in the form of frustration, desperate feelings, and failure. We need to recognize these escorts and allow them to guide us to live by manna, by Christ as our bread!

This is what the content of my blog will be for the foreseeable future: learning to eat and drink of Jesus Christ continually; learning to depend on Him and trust His Life within me; and relying on Him to be everything for me in the midst of a situation that is completely out of my control.

This is the new adventure I’m on.  I’m hoping you’ll join me and find the Lord in it with me!

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12 Responses

  1. R.C. says:

    Bring it, brother! Gotta love when God brings us to the end of ourselves to be wholly reliant upon His Christ. Looking forward to continuing this journey with you, Stag Chili.

  2. Tobias Valdez says:

    Oh, our precious brother, Marc! How you are so greatly missed! But how greatly you are loved all the more!

    I find myself in a similar situation, with the escorts the Lord is desiring to use to bring me to Him. How often I find myself resisting, fighting, even, these escorts. But then grace has a way of working His purpose through the situation and into my very being. Bless the Lord for His endless grace! Thank you for the reminder.

    It is good to have you back, in some form, even if it must, for now, be only in the blogosphere.

    Your brother,
    Tobias

  3. Carrie says:

    Thanks for the update, what a beautiful testimony of the Lord! I too have been enjoying The Supplied Life by Bill Freeman. I especially love the word escort. A blog post is going out tomorrow called Going out on a Limb and, in it, I mention that word. Sure do miss you, all the Walters say Hi!

    • Marc Hardy says:

      Thanks, sister! I just happened to stumble across this entry for this day. I think The Supplied Life is going to be my go-to devotional for the coming year.

      I hadn’t really thought about how significant that word is until you mentioned it just now. I’ll look forward to reading your post. I miss all y’all too! Say hello to everyone from me!

  4. Seth says:

    Marc, so good to read your post. As you know I have gone through and am going through this as well. It is such a blessing to know that Jesus is with us always and encouraging to know He desires to bring us to the Father more than we can muster ourselves. He even offers His own willingness to work in us when we allow it. What a good Lord we have.

  5. Angela Conley says:

    Just discovered your blog, brother! You are good! Been in the wilderness this year too, learning the same stuff! Got to spend the day with Bill Freeman once…wonderful man full of great stories. Did you know he was an elder in the Quaker church that asked John Wimber to leave? Lol, he apologized to John later…

    • Marc Hardy says:

      That’s pretty cool! I didn’t realize that about Bill Freeman. I know next to nothing about him, but I’ve been encouraged by his writings. I don’t think I’ve heard of John Wimber. What’s he known for?

  6. Becky Doescher says:

    Marc, I am new to your post. In reading this one about our escorts through the wilderness, it reminded me of Hannah Hurnard’s “Hinds’ Feet on High Places”.

    “It is the story of a young woman named Much Afraid, and her journey away from her Fearing family and into the High Places of the Shepherd, guided by her two companions Sorrow and Suffering. It is an allegory of a Christian devotional life from salvation through maturity.” Wikipedia

    I too am still going through the wilderness and think of this story often. If you have not read it, I highly recommend.

    I am encouraged by your posts. God bless you.

    • Marc Hardy says:

      That’s cool! I hadn’t really thought about that. I have read that book a couple of times. That is a great book. I’m glad you’re encouraged by what I have shared. And you as well.

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