One of the things I love more than most things is praying with my sisters in Christ...there is just something beautiful and healing about coming together with a group of women who love Jesus and ascribing praise to Him and asking Him to move knowing that we are lost and broken and in deep need of rescuing that only He can provide...
I have a lot of thoughts right now...mostly about God's purposefulness and His provision and His creativity that brings about abundant life in the most barren of places...I am learning so much right now and I feel like the Lord is speaking to me in stereo these days...the speakers being friends, accountability group, bible study, sunday school, sermons, etc...He is opening my eyes and my heart to more of life in Him...
"God guides our minds as we think things out in His presence." J.I. Packer said that and it resonates in the deepest part of who I am...I am so thankful that our God is so powerful that we can ask Him to meet us and trust Him to guide our very thoughts and perspectives and feelings as we think about things and process life with Him and in Him..
"When we stay in our story, we are destined to become disillusioned and discouraged." What a gift the Lord has given us in our ability and desire to live in community and to know other people...how miserable would we be if we were always stuck inside our own stories...it's incredibly miserable, as most of us have experienced at one point or another...the Lord has challenged me more than ever to get out of my own story and into other people's...to invest in family and reap the fruit of shared life...
"When I speak of the long night that preceded the days of my happiness, I don't remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort--grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never." Marilyn Robinson wrote that in Gilead. I love this. I love that our God is a deliverer, that He promises to never leave. and I'm humbled and thankful that I know these words to be true and I beg the Lord to finish the work that He has begun in my heart..
Lord, teach me to look at suffering and sanctification and not wish it away but explore it and marvel at the creative ways You choose to shape my character. May I see suffering and wonder what part of my character is this refining? and rejoice that you are not a God who is concerned with my comfort but a God who is concerned with my holiness..
"Certainly our contentment does not consist in getting the thing we desire, but in God's fashioning our spirits to our conditions. God works in us to view things by faith despite our changing moods, and by doing so, we see things more and more filtered through God's perspective. By doing that we can see a little more of the big picture of all of the Lord's dealings with His people and bring that to bear on what is happening in our lives." Jeremiah Burroughs wrote this. What if our contentment didn't lie in our circumstances but in the character of God? a very wise woman told me last week that a Son of promise has been born and you have great hope not because your circumstances will change but because you know the character of an unchanging God. woah. Our hope IS in the character of God.
ultimately Jesus is the reversal of everything. He is in the business of bringing dead souls to life, working in our total inability to accomplish great things, using our suffering to His glory whether He lets us in on it or not, and knowing us. really knowing us.
I am thankful for the insight that the Lord has given me into brokenness and need. and I'm sure that at the places of brokenness, barrenness, hopelessness, and need are the exact places where the Lord loves to begin new chapters that are full of life...
Ever notice that all the forefathers of Christ were strong, they were kings, they were warriors...and when Jesus came, the people missed it cause they expected Him to be strong...Ever notice that all the foremothers of Jesus were barren women, broken, sufferers, disgraced, cast aside, needy...
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