Years ago, before we came to America, I remember one day feeling rather lonely. Stuart was traveling all over the world and, at that point, I was raising the children pretty well on my own. I remember getting sick of my yoke, and I grew very bitter and angry.
I started doing a “Jeremiah” or a “Lamentations Chapter Three.” I’d say to the Lord, “You brought me into this; You got us to give our careers up, and You landed us in this mess. We never understood what it would be like!” Around the corner of my glad, “Oh yes, Lord,” there was this horrible, “Oh no, Lord,” of which I never expected. And I did my sixteen verses and more, and then God enabled me to start and do some “mind work.” Then, as I did my part, He began to do His, and He started to change my heart.
I remember sitting on a hillside that overlooked Capernwray Hall in the beautiful Lake District of England where we lived and worked, putting myself into silence, and saying to God, “I’ve got the whole afternoon. I’m going to stay up here until You do Your renewing work in me, because I’m sick of being sick of this. I want to change, and I want to be different.”
At the end of that afternoon, as God did His renewing work in my heart, and as I held my heart in my hands until it was broken and contrite, something new happened—and a new Jill Briscoe came down that hill. It was an incredible sense.
He came near into my pit.
So I was as happy with the loneliness as without it. As long as He stayed as near as that, as close as Him breathing, nearer than hands and feet—it didn’t matter. It didn’t mean He lifted the yoke and Stuart came home. No, in fact, Stuart was away more! But it didn’t matter now. Somehow there was a release. I didn’t complain and whine anymore, “Poor little me, poor little me, poor little me! Why doesn't somebody else’s wife take a little bit of this? Why is it always my children that have to say, ‘goodbye’ to their Daddy? Why can’t it be somebody else’s children, God?” Everything changed—for me and for the children—because children do not create your attitude, they reveal it! They were picking up all my resentment and all my bitterness—until that day I came down the hill.
You know something? Since that day, the Lord has said to me many times, “Do it again!” And He has laid on me a yoke that feels very familiar. All His yokes are custom made; not one size fits all. But, this is the yoke He has laid on me.
I want to tell you something—it’s alright! And it’s more than alright, it’s incredible! For HE CAME NEAR and there’s nothing like it! So you put your face in the dust, and you submit to the yoke, and He never ever gives you a yoke without the enabling that goes with it!
What is your yoke? What is He laying on you? It may be something small or it may be something big. Will you submit to it? Which part of “Lamentations Chapter Three” are you in? Are you in the first sixteen verses, getting God and life mixed up? Or is all that sorted out? Will you surrender to God in every single part of your life, especially in this new year and say, “I want to be what You made me to be! I want to do, what You made me to do!”
