Dam Girl!

No, not damn girl, but Dam Girl! Damn girl is defined as when a lady is truly awesome. This post is going to be about my Holding My Peace, which I pray would make me truly awesome in God’s eyes! In a previous post, Raising Cain, I told how I was having a bad day, and in my devotion time God telling me I’m on the brink of rebelling! I don’t want to be like Cain. God warned him, and he chose anger and killed his brother anyway. God warned me, and I choose to heed that warning. I will be thankful instead so I don’t cross the same line Cain did and get swept away by anger. Or a torrent pouring out of a broken dam.

I live within hours of a famous dam. The Hoover Dam. It is a concrete arch gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression. It was designed to be thick at the bottom and thin near the top. The arch of the dam would transmit the waters force into the rock walls of the canyon.

The first concrete was poured into the dam on June 6, 1933. Since concrete heats and contracts as it cures, the Bureau of Reclamation engineers calculated that if the dam were to be built in a single continuous pour, the concrete would take 125 years to cool, and the resulting stresses would cause the dam to crack and crumble. Instead, the ground where the dam would rise was marked with rectangles, and concrete blocks in columns were poured, some as large as 50 ft square and 5 feet high. Each five-foot form contained a set of 1-inch steel pipes; cool river water would be poured through the pipes, followed by ice-cold water from a refrigeration plant. When an individual block had cured and had stopped contracting, the pipes were filled with grout. Grout was also used to fill the hairline spaces between columns, which were grooved to increase the strength of the joints. All features of the dam were completed by March 1, 1936.

The concrete was delivered in huge steel buckets 7 feet high and almost 7 feet in diameter. These buckets, which weighed 20 tons when full. (That’s 40,000 pounds!) A total of 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete was used in the dam. Overall, there is enough concrete in the dam to pave a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York.

Concrete cores were removed from the dam for testing in 1995. They showed that Hoover Dam’s concrete has continued to slowly gain strength. 59 years later. Wow!

This is encouraging to me. Like the concrete that is still curing and gaining strength in the dam, it gives me hope that I am still getting stronger with God’s help every day to hold my peace.

I want to stay quiet, despite the sometimes overwhelming need to say something. I want to hold my peace especially if I don’t have anything constructive to add. I want to remain silent about something if it is not going to glorify God.

“The LORD shall fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.” (Exodus 14:14)

I am finding freedom in not speaking. Is the world going to come to a screeching halt if I don’t get to state my point of view? Do I really need to prove I’m right? In the end, when I’m standing before Jesus giving an account for every word I spoke, will I be happy with His examination? How can I be my best and shine His light if I am so busy speaking when it is not appropriate?

Lately, I’ve had abundant help from Holy Spirit, guiding me when not to speak. Someone pushes my buttons, and will reacting with words make it any better? Nope. Let it go. Hold my peace. Then this weekend, I was reading and these words from my Bible jumped off the page at me, and I revised them to a meaningful declaration for me, to speak over myself.

I used to think other things were worth my effort, but I’m throwing them all away so I can wholeheartedly trust and hope in Jesus alone. Everything else is worthless and I will put it aside and become one with Jesus. I have determined that the only way to really know Jesus and experience His mighty power is to give up everything else. To seek Him first and seek Him only. So whatever it takes, I will live the the fresh newness of Jesus every day. (Based on Phil. 3:11-17 [TLB] with some things added in for my benefit, and now hopefully yours.)

My need to be right and prove my point is worth less than knowing Jesus and being with Him every day. It is all just garbage and I resolve to throw it away. If I don’t I will become stinky, and no one will want to be around me. I want to be a sweet smelling fragrance instead and draw people closer to Jesus.

“But thank God! He has made us his captives and continues to lead us along in Christ’s triumphal procession. Now he uses us to spread the knowledge of Christ everywhere, like a sweet perfume. Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance rising up to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those who are being saved and by those who are perishing. To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume.”

(2 Cor 2:14-16 [NLT])

So I am choosing to follow the phrases God has given me to ponder this year.

Don’t Speak. “If I keep my mouth shut, I’ll stay out of trouble.” (Prov. 20:23)

Stand Firm. “I’ll take up my position, stand firm, and see the deliverance the Lord will give me.” (2 Chron 20:17) (I don’t mean take a position on a topic and drive your point home with your words either. I’ll let God give me deliverance.)

Unshaken. “I have set the Lord always before me. Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.” (Ps. 16:8)

Trust God. “I trust the Lord with all my heart, and will not lean on my own understanding.” (Prov. 3:5)

Sounds like a “Dam Girl—hold my peace” plan to me. I’m going to ask Holy Spirit to help me every day with self-control paired with restraint. I want to be a dam full of the goodness of God, and not have any negative words pour over, unrestrained like a torrent from a broken place. I don’t want to lose my joy by saying what I should not. Because I know that would be taking away precious time I could be spending enjoying God’s presence. Because your parent’s advice still holds true today: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

So even though I know I’m still in the “curing” process, I also know that with God’s help, I can make it!

© 2021 Fluffy Puppy Publishing All Rights Reserved