Lord PREPARE me.... to be a sanctuary!!!!

I have recently made the decision to start getting up early in the morning again and spending time with God. I did this because I came to a realization that I had gotten away from that and due to circumstances, I needed to get back to seeking God.
So what I normally do is start off by praying and asking the Holy Spirit to lead me to worship God. Then I pray a little more until God gives me a song to sing. I then spend about 30-60 minutes just worshipping God with my guitar and my voice. It's a pretty sweet time and I've developed a closer relationship with God because of it.
Anyway, recently I started off singing the song Here I am to Worship, and then the song Sanctuary (Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary) came to me. So I started singing it over and over and pretty soon the Holy Spirit showed me something through it. The key word that stuck out is prepare. As I was singing it I got this picture of a turkey dinner. If you want turkey for dinner you can't just go out and get a turkey and eat it. There is a preparation process that it has to go through before being ready to be eaten.
First you gotta kill the turkey. Then you gotta take of the feathers. Then you have to take out the gross, stinky, smelly, harmful stuff on the inside. This all sounds pretty painful and I assure you it certainly can be.
Then you stuff it with something good that will enhance it's flavor and make it taste better. Then you season it. Then you have to heat it up for a long time, thoroughly. Pretty soon you start to smell the aroma and if there are other people in the house, they get drawn in by the smell of it and get excited for what the chef has PREPARED. Pretty soon it's done. It's a nice hopefully golden brown beauty of a bird and it's ready to be consumed. When you taste it you end up showering the chef praises and compliments and perhaps even ask for the recipe. If it's good enough, you even tell other people about how great of a cook the chef is. The funny thing is that the bird looks completely different now then when it first started. It almost looks new!!
I'm sure you can see the parallels in this analogy and how they relate to us and our relationship with God. My thoughts about that song changed after that. I realize that this song is dangerous to sing!!! Essentially we are telling God that it's ok to give us pain, and heat, and to take out the insides, and even to kill us (metaphorically speaking about the scripture that talks about us dying to self). We're giving God permission to thoroughly man handle us so that we can become His sanctuary.
You see, God is specific about what He wants for us; just like He was specific about what He wanted His sanctuary to look like in the Bible.
There has been some tough family stuff that has happened and I'm realizing through wise counsel from others and through the still small voice of the Holy Spirit that the tough stuff is God's way of preparing me to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true.
Here are the words to the song if you've never heard it before. Hopefully you'll never singing it blindly again. But that you'll sing it understanding what the song means, open yourself to God, and embrace what He will do.

Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary
Pure and holy, tried and ture
With thanksgiving, I'll be a living
Sanctuary for You

It is you, Lord
Who came to save
The heart and soul
Of every man
It is you Lord
who knows my weakness
Who gives me strength,
With thine own hand.

Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary
Pure and Holy, tried and true
With thanksgiving I'll be a living
Sanctuary for you

Lead Me on Lord
From temptation
Purify me
From within
Fill my heart with
You holy spirit
Take away all my sin

Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary
Pure and holy, tried and true
With thanksgiving, I'll be a living
Sanctuary for You

The Mountaintop

If there's one thing I hate about being on a mountain top, it's that you spend more time going up the mountain and going down the mountain than you do being on top of it. Sure the journey is cool!!! Sure the views on the way up are cool and the feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment you get from conquering a mountain is quite a thrill. And of course the view at the top is like nothing else. It's AWESOME!! It's Breath-taking!! You get a different perspective at the top. You get to see where you've been and reflect on what you had to go through to get up there. I realize that in most cases all of the sweat and time and energy it took to get to the mountain top, all the doubt you had of whether you could get to the top, all of the steps you had to take, the times where you lost your footing and then regained it somehow, the switchbacks and ups, was worth going through just to get to the top.
It's peaceful up at the top. Things are more clear. Not only do you get to see where you've been, but a lot of times you get to see where you are going also. You usually get direction for where to go next.
But unfortunately, and this is the part that I hate most as I said, you spend more time ascending and descending the mountain than you do on top. I'm mean, you can't camp up there. You can stay for a little while but if you stay too long circumstances will dictate, almost mandate that the descent will be harder and therefore more dangerous.
Being on the mountain top, you do get a good view. You can see everything for miles. You become more aware of the surroundings and you can sometimes look and see places of rest, water, and even places to avoid. But you can also see the storms coming. You can also tell when it it starts to get darker; when night is coming. Sometimes we enjoy the view so much though that either we don't see them or we choose to ignore them. Those two factors alone can put you off the mountain prematurely.
After a long journey, I got to the mountain top this summer. In more ways than one. The journey was hard. There was doubt at times that I could get to the top. There was struggle and there was triumph. There were sorrows and joys. There were times along the way to the top to get fed so that I could be replenished and strengthened to carry on. There were times of rest. There were paces, sprints, and drags. The top was memorable. Satisfying. Breath-taking. Full of gladness and joy. I wanted to stay there as long as and take in as much as I could. But, then the storm clouds started closing in. It also started to get darker as night moved in. I knew that the time to go was drawing near!! And as I look at the map I realize that there is one other thing that I didn't factor in, one thing that is as probable as it is inescapable. The trail marked out for me has another mountain top and it's bigger and better than the last one. You can see more. But the catch is that the next mountain seems like it's twice as long and seems to be twice as difficult to traverse.
The irony of life!! Nothing stays the same for two long. Just like they say in good ole' Wisconsin, "If you don't like the weather, just wait a minute. It'll change."
Life never stays the same for too long no matter if you're in good times or in bad times. It's a blessing and a cures.