Today’s blog is going to be a little bit different! I hope you guys are ready to read because this will be a long one. My name is Marissa, I am one of Cheryl’s daughters. For those of you who don’t know, Cheryl is the regular author of Inspired Talk Today. My mom talked a lot about wanting to do something like a blog over the years, and I am so happy she finally got this going! It’s a great way to inspire and encourage a lot of people, so I just wanted to say first that I am proud of her for getting this into play. She had asked me some time ago if I’d be interested in writing a blog for her sometime, and I was a little intimidated. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything so I hope this is a good one.
For this blog, I’d like to talk about my favorite portion of scripture. It is a chapter that has always been very close to my heart. Whenever I first came across this scripture and spent time reading it, I was a young teen at church camp. If anyone is familiar with church camp, you know how powerful it can be and how often there God speaks to you! I cannot accurately say everything I want to say without posting the full chapter of Hosea 2.
2 [a]“Say of your brothers, ‘My people,’ and of your sisters, ‘My loved one.’
Israel Punished and Restored
2 “Rebuke your mother, rebuke her,
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
3 Otherwise I will strip her naked
and make her as bare as on the day she was born;
I will make her like a desert,
turn her into a parched land,
and slay her with thirst.
4 I will not show my love to her children,
because they are the children of adultery.
5 Their mother has been unfaithful
and has conceived them in disgrace.
She said, ‘I will go after my lovers,
who give me my food and my water,
my wool and my linen, my olive oil and my drink.’
6 Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes;
I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.
7 She will chase after her lovers but not catch them;
she will look for them but not find them.
Then she will say,
‘I will go back to my husband as at first,
for then I was better off than now.’
8 She has not acknowledged that I was the one
who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil,
who lavished on her the silver and gold—
which they used for Baal.9 “Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens,
and my new wine when it is ready.
I will take back my wool and my linen,
intended to cover her naked body.
10 So now I will expose her lewdness
before the eyes of her lovers;
no one will take her out of my hands.
11 I will stop all her celebrations:
her yearly festivals, her New Moons,
her Sabbath days—all her appointed festivals.
12 I will ruin her vines and her fig trees,
which she said were her pay from her lovers;
I will make them a thicket,
and wild animals will devour them.
13 I will punish her for the days
she burned incense to the Baals;
she decked herself with rings and jewelry,
and went after her lovers,
but me she forgot,”
declares the Lord.14 “Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the wilderness
and speak tenderly to her.
15 There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor[b] a door of hope.
There she will respond[c] as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.16 “In that day,” declares the Lord,
“you will call me ‘my husband’;
you will no longer call me ‘my master.[d]’
17 I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips;
no longer will their names be invoked.
18 In that day I will make a covenant for them
with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky
and the creatures that move along the ground.
Bow and sword and battle
I will abolish from the land,
so that all may lie down in safety.
19 I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in[e] righteousness and justice,
in[f] love and compassion.
20 I will betroth you in[g] faithfulness,
and you will acknowledge the Lord.21 “In that day I will respond,”
declares the Lord—
“I will respond to the skies,
and they will respond to the earth;
22 and the earth will respond to the grain,
the new wine and the olive oil,
and they will respond to Jezreel.[h]
23 I will plant her for myself in the land;
I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.[i]’
I will say to those called ‘Not my people,[j]’ ‘You are my people’;
and they will say, ‘You are my God.’”
When I was younger and read this back then, it seemed like a powerful chapter of scripture. It stood out to me even if I didn’t know why. I could have never known back then how much it was going to apply to my own life later on. There was a time I even gave a message on this to the youth at our church, whenever I was a youth leader. As time went on and I got older, I began to turn away from God. My entire step changed, and I started to go the opposite way. I had moved out of my parents home, and I had also stopped going to church.
As time went on, things began to go very wrong for me. Life got hard, and it was very much so full of pain. Don’t get me wrong, I had some great times in between, but it got to a point where the bad began to outweigh the good. I even went through different waves with my beliefs. One day I believed in God still, the next I didn’t. I remember saying the words out loud that I didn’t believe in God anymore. How could I when there was so much pain and hurt in my life? Then, there were times I did believe again. I believed that perhaps God was real, but not in the sense that I’d grown up learning about in church. I was all over the place with my beliefs.
Fast forward after years of living life the way I wanted to and trying to do it on my own, I felt lost. I was in a very unhealthy relationship that continued to get worse instead of better. I began to feel more sad, upset, depressed, hurt, lost, empty and NUMB. I felt so much at once that I felt nothing at all sometimes and that is a terrifying feeling. If you’ve ever been there, please know you are not alone. We had been together for many years, and I truly did love him. As time went on though, my spirit grew increasingly unsettled, and I called off our wedding. I was so broken after that.
I was devastated. I was lost. I was hurting. Sometimes I literally felt like to live was too much. I felt stripped. I felt robbed. I did things out of hurt and anger that I regret. I felt literal darkness all around me. One day, there was a Facebook memory reminder. It was of a family friend of ours that had tagged me in a post years ago, about how my message touched his heart when I spoke of Hosea 2. Hosea 2? What even was that? I didn’t remember what that was, so for the first time in years, I had opened my Bible to that chapter to see what it was. As I read the words, I began to cry uncontrollably. That same woman I had read about all those years ago at church camp and then spoken about at our youth group, was ME.
What I was reading, had always been about me. God knew before I did! I left my first love behind as I chased after my lover. My whole life became about that person, and my whole focus was to make them happy. My goal became that person and not only did I lose God, but I lost myself. There were things that I had done out of hurt and anger after I had called off our wedding, that God had also exposed and brought to light. “So now I will expose her lewdness, before the eyes of her lovers, No one will take her out of my hands…”
God had stripped me of everything that was important to me, but thankfully it doesn’t stop there. “Therefore I am now going to allure her, I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor (trouble) a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.” It’s interesting that by definition, wilderness means “a wild and uncultivated region, as of forest or desert, uninhabited or inhabited only by wild animals; a tract of wasteland.”
God stripped me and got me alone so I could hear from him. I was in the wasteland, the desert. For so many years, I had shut him out. It was only after losing everything I could hear again, and it was the voice of LOVE, even after my unfaithfulness. It reminds me of lyrics from one my favorite songs, that says “I would like to think that this is love, lost in second chances, without end.”
Everyday has been a work in progress. God has still to this day, never stopped pursuing me. He has been gentle with me even when I have been harsh or distant, and he always calls me back and welcomes me. He always loves me. Of that, I know. I can once again say not only do I believe in God, he is very real. Sometimes he has to lead us into the desert or the wilderness, stripped of everything, where it is silent so we can hear him whisper and talk to us. Perhaps it was always just so we would hear his voice again.
I got shy after my mom asked me to do a blog before, and then I kind of let it go by the wayside. This past Sunday, I watched from home our church service, and whenever Pastor Joel said this scripture, I knew I had to do the blog. With that being said, I leave you with this:
Isaiah 43:18-19, NIV
18 “Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
19 See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.He is MY God.
Thank you for sharing Marissa. I love your openness and raw emotions that come pouring out in your writing. God knows us all too well. Love you.