Love

I feel like anytime I sit down to write, my thoughts are so scattered and this would turn into one of the longest posts EVER. So, instead I will just share some verses. Afterall, they do not return void and my words SURELY will. So a big focus area in my life right now is love. Not the romantic type, despite the efforts of the elderly ladies in my church. The type of love that I am not able to understand apart from understanding the Gospel and the love of Christ. Literally anytime I think of love I am pulled to evaluate what I really mean by saying it and is it the same type of love Christ displays. The more I have grown to understand the love of Christ the more heartbreaking it is to look at the definition put out by our culture. The conditional, self-seeking, unenduring definition of love. So I share these verses just to shed some light on what love really is and what it is not.

"...God is love." 1 John 4:8 If God IS love, then apart from Him I can not know what love truly is.

"We love because he first loved us." 1 John 4:19

"but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8 This is how he loved me FIRST. I didn't love Him and he died for me.

"If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same...But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful." Luke 6:32-33;35-36 Christ demonstrated His love for us (Romans 5:8) so that through Him we may be able to demonstrate the same type of love to everyone.

"For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised." Colossians 5:14-15

"Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all of our days." Psalm 90:14

"Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you." Psalm 63:3

Please know that the only thing in our lives that will never change is God's love for us. That's for certain. It is from everlasting to everlasting. And understanding that love, as hard as it may be sometimes, is huge in living the life in the joy and peace that Christ intended for us no matter what our circumstances are, how bad someone has hurt us, or how much we think we may have the "right" to not love, because God (being perfect, righteous, and holy) has the ultimate "right" to not love but loves us anyway. Think about it. :)

I just wanted to share this picture, uhhh, because I love her a lot. And maybe just because she is so stinking cute. :)

Thankful

Today I am just so thankful for a gracious, merciful God. I am so thankful for a God that is able to love me and works things for my good through my mess. I am thankful for a God that although sending His Son for me was already far more than I deserved, He does not stop there. Upon believing and accepting the death and resurrection of His Son as a payment for my sins he sealed me with the promised Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13) to grow even closer with Him and enjoy His presence like no other. All this even when I set him aside. Even when I look to other things in my life to bring me joy and satisfy me, which let me say, they never do. His mercies are new every morning and His love is steadfast. He is the only person that truly knows me from the inside out yet he still loves me.

I attended David Platt's Secret Church on Good Friday of this year and he said something that really stood out. The orphanage he and his wife were adopting their first son from had to testify in court that no one wanted the boy they were trying to adopt. He said person after person sat on the stand and said "No one wants him...No one wants him... No one wants him." All the while he and his wife wanted to jump up and scream "WE WANT HIM!" He was giving the illustration that this is what the Lord does for us. But what really set deep with me was the realization that God -- the only person who knows everything about me. He knows how desperately sick and deceitful my heart is. He sees all of the sin in my life daily. He sees everything I hide from everyone else. He sees the stuff that no matter how much anyone in my life says that they love me, if they saw all of this about me, they would not love me, but HE says I WANT YOU. He. Wants. Me. He is the only person, in his holiness and perfection, that could JUSTLY say I want nothing to do with her, yet he loves me more than anyone else could ever imagine. That my friends is so amazing to me. It is the truth that I want tattooed on my forehead. :) He loves me, He delights in me, He desires to spend time with me. And let me tell you (in case you haven't heard) this is not some special connection I have with God. That's Him. He feels the same way about every single person He created. His love is unconditional, unfailing, and from everlasting to everlasting. Heck HE IS LOVE (1 John 4:8)! I do not even know what love is apart from him.

So today I am thankful, for the opportunity to spend time with Him, and despite my wanderings, like a good shepherd, He leads me, and he says to me "..I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord." Hosea 2:19-20 FOREVER. In rightousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, and faithfulness. I am His. And I am thankful.

Lessons in Obedience

I would say one of the biggest lessons for me over the past year has been obedience. OH yes, it sounds so simple, but it can be OH so complicated. I would like to take it back to a few months ago, when an event sparked my interest in starting to blog (months ago, thats how long it took me to actually do it.)

So one morning I got up and went downstair to our laundry room and when I walked back out of the laundry room a massive spider had emerged out of our storage area. Now, let me just say I know that people have a tendency to exaggerate in these types of stories (spiders, fish, snakes, lizards, etc.) but please know that when I say it was huge, I mean it was huge. It takes two hands to make the circle as big as he was (don't ask me why I automatically said he was a "he". I'm sure there's some deep psychological reasoning, maybe on another post.). So despite the fact that the spider is a good 15 feet from me I, gracefully, hop up on the loveseat to protect myself. I yell to one of my roommates to please come downstairs and bring shoes. Because of course thats the only reason I could not kill it, because I did not have on shoes. It had nothing to do with how large it was or anything. She comes downstairs and brings me shoes to put on to kill it. This was not what I had planned. So I am now "equipped" to kill the spider, but that is not exactly what happens. Let me remind you that he is in the middle of the floor. Wide open space, and I have plenty of opportunity. Well being the brave soul that I am, I manage to stare at him and freak myself out so much, that it took me 30 minutes to finally kill him, and by the end of his life, I was 30 minutes older, our living room had been completely rearranged because he moved, and I had a full day of reminiscing on this event.

This was one of those things that shortly after it happens I think "Oh my gosh, you are so dumb." Let me be really honest though and tell you that this happens so much in my spiritual life. I often look back on things that I have done and things that have happened and think to myself "self, that was really dumb." But seriously, here is where the lesson in obedience comes in. While I was psyching myself out, I was also trying to be realistic by telling myself things like I am so much bigger than him, and asking myself questions like what do you think is going to happen and my answers were SO unrealistic. Like he'll eat me, or a giant convoy of others are waiting behind the curtain, or somehow I'll miss him and he'll bite me and I might die. Again, so unrealistic. But that is me in so many situations in life sometimes. I have every opportunity and am more than equipped to do what the Lord has called me to do, but I psych myself out or just wait. I have all of these fears that may even seem realistic, but when I hold them up against God's Word and what I know to be truth, they are so unrealistic. You see, the thing is, I could have killed that spider in the very beginning, when he was in the middle of the floor and it would have been over. No dancing around him in my living room for 30 minutes. No 30 minutes of straight fear and anxiety. It would have just been done. Instead I wasted 30 minutes just to do what I could have done to begin with. I wonder how often I really do that with God. How often do I just sit around and think about what I know the Lord wants me to do or just postpone doing it because of fears that I may have or things I may not understand. It all reminds me of the story in Genesis 19 with Lot being warned about the destruction of Sodom. Just as Lot was warned of the destruction to come, the Lord graciously does the same thing to me, and at times I just sit there. After Lot had been warned twice in v. 16 it says "But he lingered..." He lingered. My tendency is to say, boy he's dumb. But then I look at my own life and see times where I have sat in Sodom after warnings of destruction and just as Lot was, I have had to be dragged out. In another attempt to do his own thing Lot asks to not flee to the hills as he is told but go to a city closer. His request is granted, but ends up leaving anyway because he was fearful in that city. But I love in v. 22 it says "But escape there quickly, for I can do nothing till you arrive there." We are not able to experience the fullness of what Christ has intended for us until we learn to walk in obedience to what he has asked us to do.

O God, how I pray that we will daily remember the joy of obedience and times of disobedience. I pray that we will remember Your Son and the perfect example of obedience that was shown by His walk here on earth all the way to death on a cross. I pray that through His example and Your power that we may be obedient in the small and large things and grow everyday in trusting you and being more obedient.

Take some time to read Genesis 19 if you have the chance and please feel free to share any other passages on here that contribute to this, or not.

Dumb spider. This is me being super brave.

Let's try this...

So I have been debating for a while whether or not to start a blog. It actually was not whether or not I wanted to, it was just sitting down to do it. So I am finally settled into Mathiston for a while, so I find myself with plenty of time on my hands. It's a good time to start.

Again, like all of my other blogs I have started, I will warn you, that if you know me, I blog like I think so I may be all over the place at times. I really just want a place to share things that the Lord is so graciously showing me in my own life and how He is refining me daily. I feel like I am in a big transition right now, but I am so excited about these next few months of downtime to really seek the Lord like never before and spend so much time with him that if He were human he would be SO annoyed and think I was clingy, but it works for Him and I. :)

Tonight, I have spent enough time creating this silly thing, so maybe I'll sleep on a nice inciteful blog post to share tomorrow.

(I never know if I should put my name at the end of these things because clearly you know it's me if you're reading it. So this is me not putting my name at the end.) Holla! :)