Over the past year or so God had taught me, by His severe mercy(though not nearly as severe as it is for some people…maybe semi severe mercy is more appropriate), about what grace means. For several months He took away my sanity and pretty much my ability to function as a mother (something I used to think I was pretty good at). A few months after I gave birth to my third child Eva I experienced relatively severe postpartum depression. I was completely emotionally unstable and very much not patient with my children. God brought me to a place of total humility, I had to pray continually. The verse “Be joyful always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” was a verse that God continually brought to mind. What does it mean to be joyful always? Be happy and perky all the time? Obviously joy is much deeper than happiness. Joy is resting in the fact that God is in control of all our circumstances and its not in our hands. When we can look at our lives from an eternal perspective it makes it much easier to “give thanks in all circumstances”. God will work all things together for the good of those who love him. We too often misunderstand what it means to “work all things together for our good”. “Good” doesn’t mean that our lives will be easy, Jesus’ life on earth wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy for his disciples, why would we ever think it would be easy for us. Our job is to pray continually, give our lives over to God and be confident that all the bad things that happen to us are either from Him in order to make us more Christ-like or they can be used by Him to make us more like Him. God has given us what we do not deserve, we deserve to spend all eternity in hell because we are all sinners but he has given us an eternity in heaven with him. Because he has shown us so much grace we MUST also give grace to others. Apart from the obvious way which would be telling people about Him. We must do this in the subtle areas of our lives. We must love people whom are not easy to love. We must show respect to people who have not earned it. And assume the best, not the worst, when we are unsure of someone’s motives. So much to work on…
So my purpose for doing a blog is to help improve my ability to articulate the lessons that God has taught me. It doesn’t really matter if anyone ever reads this, in fact it probably would be better if no one ever did. I don’t want to write so that people will think that I am a wise godly women although that is of course how I want people to view me and when I indulge in that desire then I think the point is missed. The point being that people would see my life and the lessons that God has taught me and think “Wow I would like to get to know the God she serves”. I have been trying to “take every thought captive” lately as it relates to speaking and sharing during bible studies. I was sitting there during Women’s Bible Study trying to rack my brain for something meaningful to add to the conversations and I even prayed that God would help me to share something wise and then I felt like God revealed my heart to me and I realized that I just want people to respect me and think highly of me…I am self centered to the core…the struggle for Christ-like perfection continues…don’t think I’m ever going to be much more than a jar of clay, its good to remember that that is what we are and all we are suppose to be in order to give all the glory to God and point people to him, if we had our act together all the time then people would think well of us and of course that is not the point….ok, I’m just rambling now I guess that’s it for my first blog post ever.
Unfeigned 