Often when we are farthest from Christ, it's when we are pursuing or clinging to something other than Him and letting it pull us away from the intimacy or communion once shared. These wild, and often reckless, pursuits are usually steered by something along the lines of selfish desires, worries, fears, deceptions, etc. Usually, I struggle with letting my concerns warp into unhealthy worries. Those worries feed on my mind and heart and can even begin to direct and dictate my actions and ways of thinking. Even one single, previously insignificant, grievance can destroy a Christ centered mindset and rebuild your thought process around whatever seems to nag you the most. Often that leads to a self centered mindset. Wherever it leads, the point is it leads your head, and consequently your heart, away from the King. And anything outside of Him is damaging, inconsistent, and futile. Since, anything good and noble and righteous comes from His heart and His hands.
Once I realized how often I fall prey to this foolishness I thought it would be best for my relationship with my first love if I found as many ways I could to prevent relapsing into the same ordeal all over again.
I figured it couldn't hurt to try it simple and basic first. So I made a commitment to evaluate myself nightly to identify any worries I haven't laid before Him, or any issues that seem to be creeping back up on me. There were so many things at first, I was overwhelmed, even confused. So I asked myself, "What are five things I cherish most on this earth?" The answer was relatively predictable.
My Family
My Closest Friends (A select group of people that if corralled together would resemble a patchwork quilt)
My Future (Husband, kids, home,.. even wedding plans! Sad. I know)
My Hopes and Ambitions (Mission field, writing, painting, living situation, instruments, blah blah)
My Comfort
I quickly came to these five things, with ease, and I knew that these were very big things to carry if I were to try and carry them on my own. And thinking excessively over something, yes, that's shifting the weight of a burden to yourself. Do we still not understand? Christ died so the weight of our sins, our worries, or every burden could be placed on Him.
I knew what I had to do, so I began. I went by order of importance all the way down to minor things, and handed each thing over to the Lord for Him to handle and do with what He will. I prayed and let all the stress drip from my toes onto the floor between the two of us. And He washed me and began to prepare me for the work He had waiting for me.
You see, our job here is to love our King and love His people. Love. But we can't just wake up and brush our teeth and give loving our best shot. Because no matter how much affection we ever muster up, it's futile. Only God's love has the sought after impact, and only His impact is eternal. We have to not be creators of love, but deliverers of love. He has asked us to be vessels of that crazy earth shaking love. But to be the vessel that is needed to preform that task we must be two things: emptied of ourselves, and filled with His spirit. I couldn't possibly be filled with Him if I was flooded with my own worries. My own worries that He has already assured me He would take care of. I had to give it all up and dump it in a pile in front of Him so He could fill me and be with me and work through me.
So if you are having a struggle with the Lord right now. One thing never fails to help and heal that relationship; the emptying of yourself. Just get rid of all the junk and He will do the rest. Amazing.

A Letter to the World

Oh world, you are becoming more and more strange to me as I grow in my faith. I feel as though I get farther and farther away from you as I pull closer and closer to the King. And as the chasm between us grows, I see you more clearly for what you are: captive. At first I was your servant, I did everything in my power to fit like a glove on your hand. To seem one of the rest, I would do anything. And then the Lord came, the merciful Lord, and he showed me his ways. They so contradicted yours that I became bitter with you, and all your people. My motive went from wisdom to knowledge the instant I felt superior to you and your corruption, and I began to swell up with pride. It filled me as air fills a balloon; soon it was the very make up of me. Pride. Puffy Pride. I looked down my nose at you until one day I realized I was not on the same page with God. I had been, but then I let me take over again, and the devil laughed as I did. For as I condemned you, I condemned me. As I shook my finger at all the hostages that occupy all the space you consist of, I misrepresented Christ and I gave points to the devil, I didn't just lose ground in the battle, I literally handed it to the enemy. I fell before my King thinking surely his mercy had reached it's limits when it came to me. Surely he would not recieve me back, atleast not as his friend ever again. But he embraced me! He began to reteach me everything, and this time it went to my heart and not my head. I stored it up like treasure never to be taken from the depths of my soul. And as I did so I began to see how small I am. The Lord grew and grew in my sight. And I got smaller and smaller. And for the Lord's good reason, my heart felt at home with the idea. I was not sitting on a throne beside God-I was face down, at his feet. And as I begin to see Him and I for what and who we are, I saw you too. I saw you captive. I saw your dictator and all the chains he held in his hands, all of them leading to people struggling beneath their weight. All of the people that I had once thought the enemy. I now saw that I had only added to their burdens. But the most painful thing I saw was myself, in each of their tired set of eyes. In their grimaces I remembered mine. I was humbled at once. My life became about two things, and not just one. Yes, now I wasn't just living to love the Lord, I was living to love his greatest creation. People. No matter who. No matter how bad they had messed up, because in the eyes of the Father, all our sin weighed the same when His son took it all upon himself...

A God Who Cares Today

I will never know why, but I always subconsciously revert to this frame of mind where I think the Lord that was obviously active in the past, and going to be in the future, isn't active right now. Sounds just awful right? And I didn't even realize that my brain was convincing my heart to feel that way when I wasn't directly thinking about how active the Lord is in my life. I think- I know, that this has been a detriment to my Faith, and I think it's served to quench the Holy Spirit. I have just stumbled upon this realization, and I'm frustrated with myself. I have a feeling that this frame of mind has resulted in lost opportunity to witness, to demonstrate and represent, and to really live the abundant life. It's like I wake up and think, "Man the Lord did so much yesterday", but I don't even consider what He'll do today.
      I have entered a new season of my life. A season that requires a new level of commitment to His will, and a new level of trust in Him. In this season I must remember every day, every moment I can, that God is active in my life TODAY! God is active in your life today! He is always just dying to do great things with us, always dying to be that much closer with us, and if you ever doubt that just remember, He did die so that He could move in us. He did die. All for us. And that enormous, historical, and infamous amount of love that was shown that day He was hanging on a bloody cross for us, is the exact same love He has for us right this very second.
     Acknowledging that crazy love He has for us is crucial for our lives, but responding to that love is what really allows him to work through us in an evident, bold, and undeniable way. I want to respond. Don't you want to respond to that love? How can we just leave it at that, how can we just hear the Gospel, the story of His love for us, and just say "Oh how nice, bless his heart." HOW? I'm asking myself more than I'm asking you. It is so necessary that we respond, it is so necessary that we keep our hearts exposed and opened to Him. We need to read, we need to pray, we need to chase after Him.
     I was reading and trying to hear what He had to say about my heart right now, what He wants me to know as I enter this new season, and I found this verse:

Psalm 27:8 You have said, "Seek my face." My heart says to you, "Your face, Lord, do I seek."

   As simple as that. I was saying "God what do I do, so much life is coming up on me, so many choices, so many opportunities, and I have a feeling, many trials." I was begging Him to show me what to do.  I felt like I had hit a fork in the road and I needed to map out my next mile after this point. And then the Lord said, "Seek My Face." "Seek my face", he said. And I read David's response. My HEART. His whole heart was responding. He wasn't just verbally spilling out an obligated response. He was honestly committing and responding to this one simple request that the Lord made. David was often referred to as "a man after God's own heart"; you don't know how many times I have told myself "Man, I want to be a girl after God's own heart," just like David who invested his whole self into the pursuit of Christ. David was considered a man after God's own heart because he sought the Lord's face. Like a mad man, he sought after His face, the one thing Moses was forbidden to look upon, David committed his everything to running after God. And here I was faced with that one little sentence, three words: SEEK MY FACE. And I realized, yeah, this life should be spent seeking Him. That is seriously all that matters. It doesn't matter where I'm at, who I'm with, what I'm doing, what I am, if I'm not seeking the Lord I have nothing. I am nothing. The places he will take me, I can't get there by simply being told, "Go do that", I'll get there by blindly chasing after his face, oblivious to all else. This concept sounds absolutely insane, but that lifestyle has the most promising results. I don't need to map out anything, I don't need to make any plans, He has already done that for me. I just need to follow. I just need to remember that He cares right now. And in this moment He is holding great things in His hands that He has died in order to give me.

                    

Engage God

In my last post I described a recent struggle I had fought with for a while before I finally came to Christ and just handed it over. It's funny how we do that; after you have formed a relationship with the Lord no matter where you're at you subconsciously know the answer to you're struggling and that answer is always the same: Return to the Lord. Whether you have wondered miles and miles away from the Lord, or you simply had you're eyes closed as he stood before you, return to the Lord. Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about, and some of you probably think I'm crazy. Ha ha. But that is alright with me. Anyways, I was thinking about my last post and thinking about some things that helped me take find my way out of the fog, and one of those things was a podcast I listened to. Ben Stuart, one of my personal favorites, gave a sermon called Engage God. Perhaps you could find it if you searched Breakaway Ministries and then searched the title "Engage God", I'm sorry I don't have a more definite way of finding it, they seem to fall into my lap somehow and I never have to find them. It's a good thing too, because I wouldn't know how! Ha. But yes, please please, if you feel like there is even a remote possibility that you can relate to the way I felt, listen to that sermon and maybe it will impact you the way it did me. I wish I would have remembered to mention that podcast somewhere in the last post but I'm remembering now! Give it a listen if you get time!

That's All

I am feeling inspired. Perhaps it is the much anticipated frost and chill of the winter weather, or maybe it's the comforting presence of Christmas time, but I like to think it's the effect of a different presence; the presence of the Holy Spirit. I regret to say that I have allowed myself to fall victim to my old enemy and greatest stronghold by permitting discouragement to overthrow any courage I've ever mustered up within myself. I was sitting in a fog confused by a strange sense of defeat, an intangible and unfamiliar defeat. Before I could even recognized what was happening I had let a nasty and manipulative mindset surround and consume my prior mindset. I had been defeated by my own doubt. And can you imagine how ridiculous I felt when I realized that I had been so concerned with guarding my heart from the deceiving things around me that I forgot to guard my heart from me, and my sinful selfish nature. So engrossed by the outside that I neglected the inside. I was trying so hard to be strong that I began relying on my own strength instead of Christ's, and it all went downhill from there. Starting with questioning if my heart was in the right, if I truly had relied on the Lord and imitated him in previous trials. The Lord had led me through a valley and I had praised him repeatedly, I had taken refuge in him, and he had showed me the way to mirror Christ through the hardships. But as soon as I failed to put on the full armor and go to the Lord for my strength, I began to wondering if the way that I had journeyed through those trials was according to my heart, and that worried me. I had intended to follow the heart of Christ in that situation so that is the lie that was fed to me as soon as the devil saw an opportunity.  See how the devil can use our own minds to deceive us? He takes matters that tempt us to worry the most. For me it's been a matter on whether I am acting for Christ or for myself.  Then from there a cloud of cowardly shame was hung above my head, making me feel unworthy of the Lord's presence and to scared to ask for forgiveness for letting my mind be filled with doubt and worry. I felt captive to it, as if I were a slave to fear once more. I wallowed in self pity from there and felt abandoned, when the truth was I had floated away in that river, I stopped swimming against the current for one second and began to float backwards and was so upset about that one yard I lost that I allowed myself to lose twenty, thirty, forty more in my shame. One day. One day of lost concentration, led to miles of fog and floating away.
That's why I would encourage anyone reading this: Pursue Christ. Let his words transform you from the inside out, guide your every step, heal every wound, erase every scar, bless your every breath, left you up in every moment of discouragement. If you desire anything, desire Christ. If you lack anything, allow him to fill you. The answer, the only solution there's ever going to be is Jesus Christ. So seek him. That's all:)

An Explanation

With so many things on my mind it is no wonder I have writers block again. I bet you thought writers block came from a lack of things to think about and therefore write about. But not for me, the more things on my mind the more difficult it is to narrow it down to one single thought that will inspire a page full of thoughts. So here I am with a brain full of thoughts and potential stresses first of all attempting to tell you something worth telling, and second of all trying to not be one of those annoying writers who goes on and on expressing and justifying all the clutter and worry in their brain. You are not my vent, you didn't do anything wrong. haha. I believe it would be simply cruel to empty out all my brain junk on you! And plus I don't believe venting even works, it just gets me more worked up about the situation. Anyways, here I am venting about venting ha, I was just going to apologize for the terrible quality of posts I've been posting lately about books and what not and offer an explanation. As readers of my blog you deserve to know that I am going through a vigerous process on my own, writing my fingers off to decide a theme for a series of posts I'll be blogging soon. A theme that both inspires me to write and inspires you to live:) and vice versa hopefully. So next time I write there will be a very good reason, it may even end up like a sermon series, just depending on what gets laid on my heart. By the way by sermon I mean a sixteen year old girls version of a study. Hopefully a very interesting take that you have not yet witnessed. Alright I am off to youth!

I Finished (about the book)

I finished my book yesterday. Sometimes finishing a book makes me sad. I can't put my finger on why but I sure do feel bummed the second I read the last word. It's so final, and sure I could start all over on page one but nothing would be there the second time that wasn't there the first. I think I would just be more bummed the second time! ha. But other than my disappointment of it's ending, I was very pleased with the book itself:)
It was very sweet and sincere and it made me even more excited to be in love someday. Just as I had suspected Julia went through plenty of heart break between page one and The End. But it just made me appreciate their love all the more. Every happy story has to give you a scare! This one had plenty, just when you thought things would never see light Love stepped in and did the impossible. And by love I mean God:)
He opened and softened many a hearts and I loved reading about it. I like to imagine that every novel has or will  really take place here on earth sometime. So whoever the real Julia is! I am thrilled that you finally get to have your love:)
by the way the book wasn't at all what I expected but I loved it! I would reccomend it to any hopeless romantic out there who doesn't mind a bit of unlikely! Worth the read I would say, check it out. Love letters in the sand by Diann Hunt