I have been miserable lately. The source of this misery? I have not been trusting God. I have also been feeling like my life is empty and pointless. I used to have a mission of sharing God's love with others, but lately I have been wondering, What has God even done for me that I should share his love with others? Epiphany: All of this misery has been entangled in one big mistake, which is not recognizing all that God has done-and is doing-for me. I believe that it is foundational to simply love God for who He is and not because of what He does for us. However, a miserable attitude springs from an ungrateful heart. God made me to share His love with people, and it's time to step up to the task once again! So that brings up the question, what HAS God done for me? So I decided to brainstorm and list some things.
God has protected me from myself in that He has kept me from making some epic mistakes in the relationship department. Sometimes He held me back, sometimes He counseled me, and sometimes He just withheld the opportunity.
God has placed some of the most amazing people in my life to mentor and counsel me. He has used some of you to save my life.
God has placed me in wonderful churches and groups at the exact times that I needed to be there.
God has placed me in the lives of others and used me in ways that I never even understood at the time. God ALWAYS forgives me, even when I'm a big jerk. To put it mildly....
God always comes through financially. I just need to stop being too prideful to ask for help.
God has led me to a meaningful, rewarding job that I wouldn't have seen myself doing. I used to be afraid of people who were different than me, but I have ended up learning a lot from these kids. And guess what-we're not so different.
I used to be enslaved to a dark, twisted way of thinking and some very destructive habits. I'm not going back there again.
And that is part of the reason that I am listing these blessings-so that I never, EVER go back to the way I was.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Thursday, May 27, 2010
The Gospel in Carolyn’s Life
The Gospel in Carolyn’s Life
When I was little, I wanted to follow God. It started with not wanting to go to hell. I was motivated by fear. I remember when I was reading through part of the Old Testament before bed and I saw something about not wearing clothes woven of two or more materials; I took off my cotton-polyester pants so as to be obedient to God’s rules. I also remember a time in my life when I would pray, about every 5 minutes, that God would forgive me of all my sins. During that stage of my life, I was in a continual state of asking for forgiveness, trying to make sure that if I died I would wake in Heaven and not in hell. I also remember when I decided that I was going to “keep the Sabbath,” no matter how angry my parents were when I refused to do any chores on that day. I was going to be good and not go to hell, which is interesting, because Jesus died because we can’t be good enough, and we were going to hell. The book of Titus says “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us…” I did not know mercy. I knew hatred.
I had a lot of anger as a child. There were good days, times of anointing, possibly. But I had a lot of anger. As I became I teenager, a lot of that anger turned to depression. Or rather, it fueled my depression, for the anger never really went away. But it wasn’t just anger that caused my depression. I knew that something was wrong. Something was missing in my life. I was desperate to find out what that something was. I was a “Christian;” if I had God what else could be lacking? I had gone to my parents for help, but nothing had really been done about it. I remember one particular day when I was riding in the car with my mother. I was pleading, begging, even DEMANDING that she take me to a doctor. There was something wrong that needed to be fixed! I had been strongly opposed to anti-depressants, but at this point I was flat-out desperate. Someone, please help me! So I started taking anti-depressants.
This was around the same time in my life when I took interest in a certain boy-one who took interest back. We’ll call him N. The problem was, he wasn’t supposed to date. When we started going out, he was about 13 and I was 15 or 16 years old. Not appropriate. When I started going out with this boy, I felt like God gave me a choice: N or Me. I wasn’t choosing- that was stupid! I could have God and N. And so I chose N. I disobeyed God, I disobeyed our parents, and I did a lot of things that I wish I wouldn’t have done. And I was ashamed. My parents were upset with me and didn’t know how to handle the situation. The devil took it and ran with it. The depression had more than anger to feed on now. It had shame. So much shame. Nevertheless, I made my relationship with N the most important thing in my life. And then he dumped me. I was broken, I was ashamed, and now I was so, so alone. People say that God never leaves us, that it is we who turn our backs on God. I had walked away from God. The problem was, I couldn’t find my way back to God.
During the course of my youth, I had also struggled with being obsessive-compulsive and even paranoid, to some extent. (To be honest, I still fight obsessiveness to this day.) I watched the important things in my life fall to pieces, and tried desperately to control anything that I could. I completed 3 semesters as a theatre major at BSU, but ended up dropping out after that. I wanted to pursue something else, but I wasn’t sure what. I has stopped going to my church around the time that I started college, but had spent some time at a youth group with a guy friend. However, I didn’t really feel at home there. By the time that I dropped out of that fourth semester, I had decided that I really did want to follow God. But my mind had fallen into a wrong way of thinking. I had gone through many years being tormented by depression, self-hatred, and an obsession with suicide. My desire was still to be good. But I was an emotional wreck. So when I decided to quit my current major, I ended up dropping out of college and working.
Around this time, I had also started going to church again. My church had undergone a traumatic split while I was away, and many people that I had previously associated with (and was currently at odds with) left. Because a lot of the people that I had previously known were gone, I was put in a position to form new relationships. I had the chance to start over. Finally, some things in my life seemed to be falling into place.
As memories of N faded into the past, I desired a new relationship. I had been boy-crazy in college, but not actually dated anyone there. I was desperate for a relationship. I remember looking at a ring one day at work and wishing that someone would buy it for me. It wasn’t the same if I bought it for myself! I eventually ended up in a relationship with a guy from church. (We’ll call him L.) L seemed like a good guy, a God-send even. But to be honest, I was crazier about the idea of being in a relationship than about L himself. I was still broken inside.
Around the time that my relationship with L was forming, I was invited to go backpacking with my friend and her sister-in-law. After spending one night in the wilderness, we came back down the mountain and spent our second night at a campground. And guess who was there to meet us? N. And not just N, but his girlfriend, who would be sharing the tent with him and some other people. I was outraged. When I had agreed to go camping in the first place, this was NOT the situation I had in mind. I was trapped in an emotional hell that I did not know how to escape. I was furious and refused to share a tent with my friend. I chose instead to sleep in the car. But before I went to sleep, I wept before God. I was in such emotional agony that I didn’t know how to bear it. I couldn’t bear it. In a time and place when I felt like I had no options, God presented me with an option: Hand it over to Me. It wasn’t some noble act on my part; I was trapped and burdened by pain that I couldn’t bear. And so I gave it to God. But I hadn’t given Him everything yet.
The winter when I was going out with L was one of the best winters of my life. I was in a relationship with a sweet, honest young man, and we both had high standards of purity that we wanted to abide by. We had boundaries, and the holiness of our companionship made my world beautiful. But over time we lost self-control, and at the same time I began to fall apart both emotionally and spiritually.
I began to question God’s goodness, His very existence even. I had a supernatural experience at work that pointed me back toward God for a time, but I hadn’t fully accepted His love for me. I was an extremely hateful person, and although I thought that I had been cured of my anger problem, I still didn’t completely trust God. A lot happened in a short period of time. I quit my full-time job at the thrift store and got three part-time jobs. I ended up quitting two of them due to emotional and spiritual breakdowns that I was having. My relationship with L had become extremely unhealthy and sinful. I had become flat-out angry with God; L had tried desperately to reason with me. Before I had quit two of my jobs, I felt like God was telling me that my relationship with L was getting in the way of my relationship with Him, but I wanted so desperately to make it work. I tried to break up with L and felt so wretched that I ended up not going through with it. Then L broke up with me. At some point during all of this I had decided that I hated God. I tried to say that He didn’t exist, but I knew better. I had important-CRUCIAL- questions that I needed answers to. Any answers that I got I didn’t accept. And so I fell apart.
By God’s grace I had managed to keep one job, at TCBY. I had become friends with the manager, a passionate young woman named Jennifer Glover. I had started going to youth group with her. She had such an inexpressible joy, and an amazing faith in God.
God. The One I had always wanted to love and serve, but had somehow always fallen short of. The One who I eventually decided that I didn’t want to love, because He didn’t love people anyway.
I think that my deepest hurt was caused by the fact that I didn’t believe that God love me, personally. Even back at 15 or 16 years old, when I had believed that God loved people in general, I argued that fact that He loved me. And so I had that deep spite and hatred known only to a lover burned. After all, God is the Lover of our souls. And my soul felt unloved. But Jennifer Glover loved me. And she believed that God did, too.
Up until this point, I had grown more and more obsessive compulsive, until it climaxed in a nervous breakdown. If God wasn’t loving and good, then I couldn’t trust Him. I had the attitudes of “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong,” and especially of “Better safe than sorry.” With great intelligence comes great responsibility, and if I let anything go wrong then I was a bad person. I was responsible. It was my fault. I couldn’t let anything bad happen! It was a sickening form of perfectionism. But Glover said to trust God. Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.”
I believe that it was actually the night of the day that L broke up with me that I realized that I really needed God. What I wanted wasn’t even a factor to me anymore. My OCD was beating me up and I needed Him. I asked L to pray with me, and he listened as I committed my life to the LORD. The follow-through was difficult for me. Like I said, Glover believed in a loving God. This idea confused me. My life had been about rules and trying not to be bad. My obsession with perfection had fueled my depression and failure, and served as a catalyst for the demonic oppression that I had been living under. I wouldn’t forgive myself for things. I had physically beaten myself as a teenager. I had tried cutting, alcohol, suicide…
By the time that I dropped out of college the physical abuse wasn’t as prevalent. But I was still under deep psychological torture. Because I thought that I had spent so much of my life seeking after God, I attributed my aching loneliness to some short-coming on His behalf (after I had already blamed myself). I had always wanted Him to step in and save me somehow. I wanted Him to hold my hand physically when I was upset. I wanted Him to hold me. To comfort me. To speak to me. Say ANYTHING! People told me that God speak to people through the Bible. Well, none of the books started with Dear Carolyn Wilson... I knew who they were really written to! Hello, 1st and 2nd Corinthians were written to the Corinthians! They also told me that sometimes God speaks to us through other people. Well, that is what you do when you are angry with someone! “Mom, will you please tell my sibling not to play with my toys?” “Stacy, will you please tell Amy that I am not speaking to her today?”
So I hated God because He wouldn’t even talk to me. How could He possibly love me?? Also, I struggled with things that had happened in the past, because God had LET them happen. I knew that some things were my own fault, due to my own rebelliousness. But there are some things that happen that are downright WRONG. It wasn’t just about me, what about all the sweet little children, not even old enough to defend themselves, who are hurt by abusive parents, murderers, rapists? When I saw a God who had the power and authority to prevent these things from happening, but didn’t, in my eyes it was the same thing as Him doing those things Himself. It was the same as Him hurting me Himself. But deep down inside, I wanted to serve a God who really did love. A God who IS love.
I remember driving in my car one day and deciding, I am going to love people. I don’t care what God thinks. I don’t care if I’m bad.
I decided that I was going to love people no matter what the cost. I wasn’t going to worry about rules or regulations or whether or not I was behaving. I had decided to worship love. If there was a God who was love, then I was worshiping Him. I would make up my own religion if I had to. If God had a problem with me loving people like that, then He could just send me to hell when I died! At least I would make people’s lives better in the mean time. It wasn’t even about me anymore. I was going to bring joy into other people’s lives. And I was going to live in a joy that came with freedom for the first time in my life!
1 John 4:8 says that “God is love.” It was hard for me to fully grasp that at first. I felt like I was being rebellious. Maybe even wicked. Somewhere along the line I had gotten God and Satan mixed up. Now I had to completely reverse my thinking. God is love. He loves me. He cares for me. He wants me. He cares for other people, as well. He wants me to love them, too. My questions took the back burner while faith blazed the trail. But bottling up questions is a dangerous thing, and so God spoke.
I remember crawling into bed one night, totally exhausted. It was finally time for some sleep! And then…
ASK ME YOUR QUESTIONS.
What? I was pooped; it was time for bed! But…
ASK ME YOUR QUESTIONS.
I didn’t necessarily want to open up to God. Many times when I had asked Him questions in the past, I had felt like they had gone unanswered. I felt like He had failed me. I was suspicious and a little angry.
Why didn’t You answer me before?
ASK ME AGAIN, I WILL ANSWER YOU.
OK, I couldn’t be a fool. I had to take Him up on this, before it was too late!
Well, for starters I wanted to know who I was going to marry-
NOT THOSE QUESTIONS. YOUR REAL QUESTIONS.
Oh, those questions. The ones that caused me to doubt Him.
OK, it was time. Time to lay all the cards out on the table and get some straight talking done. So I asked Him. And He answered me. Not all answers that I liked, but He is a person. Having a disagreement with Him is evidence of this.
That is what really began our relationship. Talking to Him. And finally believing that He really loves me. That He does care for me. That I can TRUST HIM. God’s love has changed me forever. I finally have that deep, intimate relationship that I craved all along, but never really understood how to enter. God didn’t speak to me audibly. I hear Him in my head. In my heart. I hear Him when I am reading out of my Bible and the text jumps off the page at me as if it has come to life (and it has). I hear Him when someone says something to me and I know that that’s what God would have said if He had been standing there physically. When I have doubted God’s love for me, He has assured me that it will never fail. My testimony isn’t really the story. It is the prelude to a beautiful life. It involved many battles, and One gracious, ever-loving GOD.
Praise to Jesus, the Lover of my Soul!
When I was little, I wanted to follow God. It started with not wanting to go to hell. I was motivated by fear. I remember when I was reading through part of the Old Testament before bed and I saw something about not wearing clothes woven of two or more materials; I took off my cotton-polyester pants so as to be obedient to God’s rules. I also remember a time in my life when I would pray, about every 5 minutes, that God would forgive me of all my sins. During that stage of my life, I was in a continual state of asking for forgiveness, trying to make sure that if I died I would wake in Heaven and not in hell. I also remember when I decided that I was going to “keep the Sabbath,” no matter how angry my parents were when I refused to do any chores on that day. I was going to be good and not go to hell, which is interesting, because Jesus died because we can’t be good enough, and we were going to hell. The book of Titus says “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us…” I did not know mercy. I knew hatred.
I had a lot of anger as a child. There were good days, times of anointing, possibly. But I had a lot of anger. As I became I teenager, a lot of that anger turned to depression. Or rather, it fueled my depression, for the anger never really went away. But it wasn’t just anger that caused my depression. I knew that something was wrong. Something was missing in my life. I was desperate to find out what that something was. I was a “Christian;” if I had God what else could be lacking? I had gone to my parents for help, but nothing had really been done about it. I remember one particular day when I was riding in the car with my mother. I was pleading, begging, even DEMANDING that she take me to a doctor. There was something wrong that needed to be fixed! I had been strongly opposed to anti-depressants, but at this point I was flat-out desperate. Someone, please help me! So I started taking anti-depressants.
This was around the same time in my life when I took interest in a certain boy-one who took interest back. We’ll call him N. The problem was, he wasn’t supposed to date. When we started going out, he was about 13 and I was 15 or 16 years old. Not appropriate. When I started going out with this boy, I felt like God gave me a choice: N or Me. I wasn’t choosing- that was stupid! I could have God and N. And so I chose N. I disobeyed God, I disobeyed our parents, and I did a lot of things that I wish I wouldn’t have done. And I was ashamed. My parents were upset with me and didn’t know how to handle the situation. The devil took it and ran with it. The depression had more than anger to feed on now. It had shame. So much shame. Nevertheless, I made my relationship with N the most important thing in my life. And then he dumped me. I was broken, I was ashamed, and now I was so, so alone. People say that God never leaves us, that it is we who turn our backs on God. I had walked away from God. The problem was, I couldn’t find my way back to God.
During the course of my youth, I had also struggled with being obsessive-compulsive and even paranoid, to some extent. (To be honest, I still fight obsessiveness to this day.) I watched the important things in my life fall to pieces, and tried desperately to control anything that I could. I completed 3 semesters as a theatre major at BSU, but ended up dropping out after that. I wanted to pursue something else, but I wasn’t sure what. I has stopped going to my church around the time that I started college, but had spent some time at a youth group with a guy friend. However, I didn’t really feel at home there. By the time that I dropped out of that fourth semester, I had decided that I really did want to follow God. But my mind had fallen into a wrong way of thinking. I had gone through many years being tormented by depression, self-hatred, and an obsession with suicide. My desire was still to be good. But I was an emotional wreck. So when I decided to quit my current major, I ended up dropping out of college and working.
Around this time, I had also started going to church again. My church had undergone a traumatic split while I was away, and many people that I had previously associated with (and was currently at odds with) left. Because a lot of the people that I had previously known were gone, I was put in a position to form new relationships. I had the chance to start over. Finally, some things in my life seemed to be falling into place.
As memories of N faded into the past, I desired a new relationship. I had been boy-crazy in college, but not actually dated anyone there. I was desperate for a relationship. I remember looking at a ring one day at work and wishing that someone would buy it for me. It wasn’t the same if I bought it for myself! I eventually ended up in a relationship with a guy from church. (We’ll call him L.) L seemed like a good guy, a God-send even. But to be honest, I was crazier about the idea of being in a relationship than about L himself. I was still broken inside.
Around the time that my relationship with L was forming, I was invited to go backpacking with my friend and her sister-in-law. After spending one night in the wilderness, we came back down the mountain and spent our second night at a campground. And guess who was there to meet us? N. And not just N, but his girlfriend, who would be sharing the tent with him and some other people. I was outraged. When I had agreed to go camping in the first place, this was NOT the situation I had in mind. I was trapped in an emotional hell that I did not know how to escape. I was furious and refused to share a tent with my friend. I chose instead to sleep in the car. But before I went to sleep, I wept before God. I was in such emotional agony that I didn’t know how to bear it. I couldn’t bear it. In a time and place when I felt like I had no options, God presented me with an option: Hand it over to Me. It wasn’t some noble act on my part; I was trapped and burdened by pain that I couldn’t bear. And so I gave it to God. But I hadn’t given Him everything yet.
The winter when I was going out with L was one of the best winters of my life. I was in a relationship with a sweet, honest young man, and we both had high standards of purity that we wanted to abide by. We had boundaries, and the holiness of our companionship made my world beautiful. But over time we lost self-control, and at the same time I began to fall apart both emotionally and spiritually.
I began to question God’s goodness, His very existence even. I had a supernatural experience at work that pointed me back toward God for a time, but I hadn’t fully accepted His love for me. I was an extremely hateful person, and although I thought that I had been cured of my anger problem, I still didn’t completely trust God. A lot happened in a short period of time. I quit my full-time job at the thrift store and got three part-time jobs. I ended up quitting two of them due to emotional and spiritual breakdowns that I was having. My relationship with L had become extremely unhealthy and sinful. I had become flat-out angry with God; L had tried desperately to reason with me. Before I had quit two of my jobs, I felt like God was telling me that my relationship with L was getting in the way of my relationship with Him, but I wanted so desperately to make it work. I tried to break up with L and felt so wretched that I ended up not going through with it. Then L broke up with me. At some point during all of this I had decided that I hated God. I tried to say that He didn’t exist, but I knew better. I had important-CRUCIAL- questions that I needed answers to. Any answers that I got I didn’t accept. And so I fell apart.
By God’s grace I had managed to keep one job, at TCBY. I had become friends with the manager, a passionate young woman named Jennifer Glover. I had started going to youth group with her. She had such an inexpressible joy, and an amazing faith in God.
God. The One I had always wanted to love and serve, but had somehow always fallen short of. The One who I eventually decided that I didn’t want to love, because He didn’t love people anyway.
I think that my deepest hurt was caused by the fact that I didn’t believe that God love me, personally. Even back at 15 or 16 years old, when I had believed that God loved people in general, I argued that fact that He loved me. And so I had that deep spite and hatred known only to a lover burned. After all, God is the Lover of our souls. And my soul felt unloved. But Jennifer Glover loved me. And she believed that God did, too.
Up until this point, I had grown more and more obsessive compulsive, until it climaxed in a nervous breakdown. If God wasn’t loving and good, then I couldn’t trust Him. I had the attitudes of “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong,” and especially of “Better safe than sorry.” With great intelligence comes great responsibility, and if I let anything go wrong then I was a bad person. I was responsible. It was my fault. I couldn’t let anything bad happen! It was a sickening form of perfectionism. But Glover said to trust God. Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.”
I believe that it was actually the night of the day that L broke up with me that I realized that I really needed God. What I wanted wasn’t even a factor to me anymore. My OCD was beating me up and I needed Him. I asked L to pray with me, and he listened as I committed my life to the LORD. The follow-through was difficult for me. Like I said, Glover believed in a loving God. This idea confused me. My life had been about rules and trying not to be bad. My obsession with perfection had fueled my depression and failure, and served as a catalyst for the demonic oppression that I had been living under. I wouldn’t forgive myself for things. I had physically beaten myself as a teenager. I had tried cutting, alcohol, suicide…
By the time that I dropped out of college the physical abuse wasn’t as prevalent. But I was still under deep psychological torture. Because I thought that I had spent so much of my life seeking after God, I attributed my aching loneliness to some short-coming on His behalf (after I had already blamed myself). I had always wanted Him to step in and save me somehow. I wanted Him to hold my hand physically when I was upset. I wanted Him to hold me. To comfort me. To speak to me. Say ANYTHING! People told me that God speak to people through the Bible. Well, none of the books started with Dear Carolyn Wilson... I knew who they were really written to! Hello, 1st and 2nd Corinthians were written to the Corinthians! They also told me that sometimes God speaks to us through other people. Well, that is what you do when you are angry with someone! “Mom, will you please tell my sibling not to play with my toys?” “Stacy, will you please tell Amy that I am not speaking to her today?”
So I hated God because He wouldn’t even talk to me. How could He possibly love me?? Also, I struggled with things that had happened in the past, because God had LET them happen. I knew that some things were my own fault, due to my own rebelliousness. But there are some things that happen that are downright WRONG. It wasn’t just about me, what about all the sweet little children, not even old enough to defend themselves, who are hurt by abusive parents, murderers, rapists? When I saw a God who had the power and authority to prevent these things from happening, but didn’t, in my eyes it was the same thing as Him doing those things Himself. It was the same as Him hurting me Himself. But deep down inside, I wanted to serve a God who really did love. A God who IS love.
I remember driving in my car one day and deciding, I am going to love people. I don’t care what God thinks. I don’t care if I’m bad.
I decided that I was going to love people no matter what the cost. I wasn’t going to worry about rules or regulations or whether or not I was behaving. I had decided to worship love. If there was a God who was love, then I was worshiping Him. I would make up my own religion if I had to. If God had a problem with me loving people like that, then He could just send me to hell when I died! At least I would make people’s lives better in the mean time. It wasn’t even about me anymore. I was going to bring joy into other people’s lives. And I was going to live in a joy that came with freedom for the first time in my life!
1 John 4:8 says that “God is love.” It was hard for me to fully grasp that at first. I felt like I was being rebellious. Maybe even wicked. Somewhere along the line I had gotten God and Satan mixed up. Now I had to completely reverse my thinking. God is love. He loves me. He cares for me. He wants me. He cares for other people, as well. He wants me to love them, too. My questions took the back burner while faith blazed the trail. But bottling up questions is a dangerous thing, and so God spoke.
I remember crawling into bed one night, totally exhausted. It was finally time for some sleep! And then…
ASK ME YOUR QUESTIONS.
What? I was pooped; it was time for bed! But…
ASK ME YOUR QUESTIONS.
I didn’t necessarily want to open up to God. Many times when I had asked Him questions in the past, I had felt like they had gone unanswered. I felt like He had failed me. I was suspicious and a little angry.
Why didn’t You answer me before?
ASK ME AGAIN, I WILL ANSWER YOU.
OK, I couldn’t be a fool. I had to take Him up on this, before it was too late!
Well, for starters I wanted to know who I was going to marry-
NOT THOSE QUESTIONS. YOUR REAL QUESTIONS.
Oh, those questions. The ones that caused me to doubt Him.
OK, it was time. Time to lay all the cards out on the table and get some straight talking done. So I asked Him. And He answered me. Not all answers that I liked, but He is a person. Having a disagreement with Him is evidence of this.
That is what really began our relationship. Talking to Him. And finally believing that He really loves me. That He does care for me. That I can TRUST HIM. God’s love has changed me forever. I finally have that deep, intimate relationship that I craved all along, but never really understood how to enter. God didn’t speak to me audibly. I hear Him in my head. In my heart. I hear Him when I am reading out of my Bible and the text jumps off the page at me as if it has come to life (and it has). I hear Him when someone says something to me and I know that that’s what God would have said if He had been standing there physically. When I have doubted God’s love for me, He has assured me that it will never fail. My testimony isn’t really the story. It is the prelude to a beautiful life. It involved many battles, and One gracious, ever-loving GOD.
Praise to Jesus, the Lover of my Soul!
Saturday, May 15, 2010
THANKFULNESS
I don't feel like posting anything really long right now, but let me say this: THANKFULNESS is incredibly important! It has released so much joy in my life!!
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Eve
I have been thinking about Eve recently. Maybe it is because they talked about her so much in the book Captivating, or maybe it is just that we have so much in common and God wants me to learn from her; probably both. So here is what I have been thinking about.
Eve is responsible for the first human sin (besides Adam's passivity in letting her commit it-see Captivating). She gets a bad rap for that, understandably. But I probably would have done the same thing. And I am not just saying this because none of us are any better than her, I'm saying it because I do do what she did.
Eve saw something that she wasn't supposed to have. The devil convinced her that God was holding out on her (I think that I got this concept, also, from Captivating). Eve looked at the fruit. It looked tasty, and would open her eyes to things that she had never known before (see Genesis). It had multiple perks. Food for the body, food for thought. And she wanted to be like God (I forgot who pointed this out to me). She loved God! What a great idea to eat the fruit! Maybe God would even be proud of her. Oh wait, God had said not to eat that fruit...
Maybe He had meant a different fruit? She could have misheard Him. Or He could be testing her. To see how much she loved Him? Whether or not she wanted to be like Him? Whether she would think for herself (even though she has been listening to Satan)? She was independent! And as for what God had said, well maybe that wasn't really God's voice at all-that is what I often think. How do I know if that was really God?
So Eve took the fruit and ate it. Adam let her eat it; no protests or counsel against it. Adam even joined her in the tasty treat.
But it was sin. It brought death.
I don't want to end on a miserable note, so let me say a couple of things to close. First of all, never doubt God's voice! His word will never return void (see Isaiah 55:11)! Secondly, Jesus died in our place so that we could be forgiven. Whether you did the wrong thing rebelliously, or because it seemed like a good idea at the time, confess. Repent- CHANGE YOUR WAY OF THINKING. If you are sorry, ask God to forgive you and HE WILL FORGIVE YOU. YOUR SIN IS NOT TOO BIG. HE LOVES YOU!!
Eve is responsible for the first human sin (besides Adam's passivity in letting her commit it-see Captivating). She gets a bad rap for that, understandably. But I probably would have done the same thing. And I am not just saying this because none of us are any better than her, I'm saying it because I do do what she did.
Eve saw something that she wasn't supposed to have. The devil convinced her that God was holding out on her (I think that I got this concept, also, from Captivating). Eve looked at the fruit. It looked tasty, and would open her eyes to things that she had never known before (see Genesis). It had multiple perks. Food for the body, food for thought. And she wanted to be like God (I forgot who pointed this out to me). She loved God! What a great idea to eat the fruit! Maybe God would even be proud of her. Oh wait, God had said not to eat that fruit...
Maybe He had meant a different fruit? She could have misheard Him. Or He could be testing her. To see how much she loved Him? Whether or not she wanted to be like Him? Whether she would think for herself (even though she has been listening to Satan)? She was independent! And as for what God had said, well maybe that wasn't really God's voice at all-that is what I often think. How do I know if that was really God?
So Eve took the fruit and ate it. Adam let her eat it; no protests or counsel against it. Adam even joined her in the tasty treat.
But it was sin. It brought death.
I don't want to end on a miserable note, so let me say a couple of things to close. First of all, never doubt God's voice! His word will never return void (see Isaiah 55:11)! Secondly, Jesus died in our place so that we could be forgiven. Whether you did the wrong thing rebelliously, or because it seemed like a good idea at the time, confess. Repent- CHANGE YOUR WAY OF THINKING. If you are sorry, ask God to forgive you and HE WILL FORGIVE YOU. YOUR SIN IS NOT TOO BIG. HE LOVES YOU!!
Friday, May 7, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Random Question (and answer)
This was my random profile question, but it said that my answer was too long, so I am posting it here.
Sponges and tongues are frequently misspelled. Is it because both are thirsty?
It is often hard to think straight when our bodily needs have not been met. So for those with inferior powers of concentration it would be almost unbearable to try to write either of these words because immediately upon hearing either one of them, I suppose that their tongue would swell up and then all they would be able to think about would be the misery of their discomfort. And the worst part is, when you get part of a sponge wet and try to use it, it's likely to tear, so then they would be trying to figure out how to get all of their tongue wet at once, lest the same fate befall a dear member of their own body.
Sponges and tongues are frequently misspelled. Is it because both are thirsty?
It is often hard to think straight when our bodily needs have not been met. So for those with inferior powers of concentration it would be almost unbearable to try to write either of these words because immediately upon hearing either one of them, I suppose that their tongue would swell up and then all they would be able to think about would be the misery of their discomfort. And the worst part is, when you get part of a sponge wet and try to use it, it's likely to tear, so then they would be trying to figure out how to get all of their tongue wet at once, lest the same fate befall a dear member of their own body.
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