"The secret is knowing that it is Christ in me, not me in different circumstances, that changes things."

Treading Water

Ever feel like you're just treading water, barley keeping your head above the surface? Waiting for that moment where you can press your feet on something stable again. I get that way every once in while. Where I feel like I'm being pulled in so many directions that if I could just regain focus maybe I could hold it all together.

Those are the moments where I feel God remind me,

"You don't need to carry that. Stop trying to hold it all together, that's my job. Keep your eyes on Me. Don't concern yourself with the what-ifs of later. Be here, right here in this moment. And what ever it takes, love. Love and let yourself remember how loved you are. My love endures forever and even in the midst of chaos, my love is there waiting for you. Let my love rescue you from raging seas. Look only to Me and I'll be the rock you can stand on. Let my love shield you from the pouring rain. Let my love fill you till it over flows into the mess around you. I will finish what I have started. You don't need to worry."

Jehoviah Nissi

You never leave me.
You hold me tight when the dark rolls in.
I am trusting in You.
In this hurricane I stand firm on Your promise.
I cry out Jehovah Nissi
Your name will be my banner in this battle.
You are faithful til the end.
You restore my soul.
Your peace transcends understanding
Your words light my way
You are always good
When all else seems bad.
Even in the moments I can't feel You
You are there
Never for one moment forgetting me.

Today, He was My Refuge

You restore my heart oh, Lord
You bring peace to my chaos
You draw me near you,
In the midst of all these people,
You calm my soul.
This small moment with you
brings arms of refuge
It's a waterfall of comfort
that falls from my my head to my feet
Your love seals me from the rain
and I am only soaked by
awareness of how well you take care of me
when I let You.
Beautiful surrender is the fire of Your embrace.
All worry melts to the floor.

Here goes nothing

I hate what I'm about to write but it's like word vomit, as hard as I am trying to ignore it, and hold it in, it just does not seem possible. Ugh. Literally, I know once I write it that I'm obligated, that my mentality has to change, that I'm committed and quitting is not an option.

I do not like the idea of "commitment". Let me explain what I'm referencing. I am talking about that thing girls do where they feel like God has called them to a season of no dating and then by the end of it they end up with some awesome boyfriend waiting hand and foot for them. Here's why I don't like it. I went through a period of time where I was more than glad to not be dating anyone. No one I knew seemed sufficient anyway and spending time with God was easy, I mean what else did I have to do? That sounds a whole lot like the same season those girls talked about only mine was not something I had to choose. I was happy to be right where I was. Now, the truth of matter currently is...

I've gotten away from that care free state I once lived so freely in. It makes me mad at myself. Why do I want someone now? Why am I not fully satisfied sometimes? It's frustrating. And I can feel God telling me that, that's what the commitment is for. Before, loving God and God alone was not something I had to make myself do. Now it's about choosing Him. Choosing Him doesn't just mean saying no to everything else, but actively pursuing with everything in me. Dedication takes effort and I realize that this may be harder than I want to admit, not because I even have other options, but because I know there are parts of me that have been riding this journey on autopilot. I've fought doing this for a couple weeks now because I wanted my motives to be right, but God's been whispering, stop worrying about that, stop over thinking, just say yes and trust me. How long? Something in my gut says August, but if it's longer than so be it. I've officially become one of those girls, reluctantly.

This should be interesting.

"But this I know with all my heart, His wounds have paid my ransom."

A Love So Sweet

Something I've realized about myself is that I've been going about my life trying to live up to all the misconceptions about myself. That I need to be better at this, that I'm a christian so I ought to speak like this or talk this way or give off a certain persona. I waste tons of time thinking about what I should be or need to be that I have lost sight of the one thing I know to be true. I am His child. Nothing else even matters. At the end of the day we are all His children. All lost, yet somehow all found in the arms of mercy if we so choose. He doesn't want anything but for us to let Him love us so that we may share that love with people who have never known something so sweet. To be broken for the cause of Christ is far more beautiful that to continually try to hold ourselves together in an already broken world.

Father, may your word continue to be the lamp at my feet. May you guide me step for step, in a rush for nothing, but with a desire that is running.

So Legit and So Extremely True

Another reblog from someone else, but it will be for someone. So please read it in case that someone is you.

"I wake up in my own tension daily. Slept through the time I had planned for You and I can hear the accusing one sitting on my shoulder, an inch from me, his voice is like acid, seething yet smooth. It masquerades as truth and yet,

I sit and wait for it. Distorted truth, so tailored, sewn to fit me snug like a straight jacket. Bound, I put my own arms in the sleeves.

'Look at your brokenness.
Look at it. Look at your pieces.
Unlovable.

Look at your situation.
Too many unknowns and fears to move.
You're paralyzed, hopeless.

Look at your emotions.
Too many of them too spread out, most of them wrong.
Some barely exist.

He said you were made for love, did He mean it? He said you were made for Him, did it mean it? Is He really happy with you? How could He be? You've seen yourself.'

And when I am looking at Him, the accuser throws more distractions my way. A blatant attempt to keep me from Him. To keep me closed off and alone.

But my Beloved,
He is King.
And my Beloved,
His eyes are flames of fire, and if you saw how jealous they are for me,
you could not stand in His presence.
I know His eyes are mine and His heart is for me.
And He took my sin
He took it, along with your twisted words and lies void of hope that you've been screaming at me for twenty something years.
Nothing can keep me from Him,
Not my pain, not your lies, not sickness, nor death, not shame, not my sin, not even my own complacency.
Nothing can keep me from the love of my Father.

Oh Beloved, You are the glue that holds me together. Help me to remember when my eye avert You, when I run, when I quench Your spirit and fall apart, You have not left.
You never leave."

Love this

Had to Reblog, So Read

To reblog on here you, you have to actually type it all out, but I'm totally feeling this post from this girl's blog I always read. She and I had similar revelations this week apparently. Anyway, I want to share it with you guys. So enjoy.

"Your joy does not come from knowledge about Him. Your peace does not come from understanding or revelation. Your love for Him does not come from a desire birthed from your own tries at righteousness. He Himself, is your joy. And that joy is your strength. He Himself is your peace. And that peace surpasses all understanding. When He is your peace nothing can shake you. Nothing can alter you. Nothing can move or distract you. He Himself is the love inside you. You are only able to love God, by being filled by God. Please hear me. You can not do this on your own. If you are feeling empty, if you are feeling led astray, if you are feeling weak or sad or discouraged or disillusioned. Look to Him. Look at Him. He has all you need. And you must stop trying to be 'good enough' for Him. He says you are beautiful. He already delights in you. Stop trying to get what you are already freely given."

Quote of the Week

"God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." -C.S. Lewis

There is no Joy without the Joy Giver

Another thought. I have been going through this kind of funk, if you will. Everything was going great and yet I had not joy. It was frustrating me. Not because I just wanted to feel "awesome" all the time, but because no matter how good things seemed to be going, I felt empty and almost bitter. Why? I kept asking myself.. and nothing seemed to fit together just right.

Yesterday I went for a walk/jog in the cold. It was surprisingly refreshing and there in the freezing wind, the revelations started hitting me like a ton of bricks. I think I already hit on it some when I talked about God revealing how selfish I am, but I am going to go there again because it has a great importance. You see, to spite the fact that I was involved in ministry, never missed a sunday, even teaching in His name, there is no joy in that if I am doing it for any reason other than to bring Him glory. When I wasn't doing those things I would notice that the things I said to people were almost down right mean. People that have known me for years would even notice that my joy was gone. It was ugly and I knew it, infact I hated it.

"A good man brings good things out of good stored up in his heart, and an evil mans brings out evil things from evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of." -Luke 6:45

If you are not truly filling yourself up with Him, than you start expelling nothing but your own emptiness. I speak only from experience friends.

I Trade These Ashes in

Woke up late last night with this thought. It's a simple one but so extremely relevant to my life right now. I truly feel God is bringing into light all the things ugly and worldly about my life. In the past I have felt this holy fire but only enough to get scorched, and that did nothing but leave a scar. But when you let yourself be submerged in the fire, completely. That is when the true purification happens. And when it's complete. Just like it talks about in that Don Moen song called At the Foot of The Cross, He let's you trade your ashes in for beauty.

Man, He's been rocking my world lately.

Rid me of myself

I had a dream the other night that I was having a conversation with someone that I really respect and always listen to. We were sitting in the middle of a room full of our friends but they were all asleep so we had to whisper. He looked me straight in the eyes and said I don't want you to say the name Lord, anymore unless you mean it. I remember being confused by what he said and kind of offended.

Mean it? Do I not always mean it?

I started thinking about the way I pray and the context I use when I'm talking about Him. I realized pretty quickly that sometimes I don't mean it. Sometimes I use His name to my advantage, not to glorify Him but in a way to glorify myself.

What an ugly thing to realize about yourself, luckily realizing it means I am perfectly capable of changing it.

Rid me of myself, Lord. I belong to You.

:)

He speaks in Silence

"We need to find God and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is a friend of silence. See how nature, trees, grass all grow in silence. See the stars, the moon and the sun, they all move in silence. We need that kind of silence to be able to touch souls." -Mother Theresa

Porch Perfection

Holy and Sanctified

I am loving what teaching on Wednesday nights is teaching me. I have 5th, 6th, and 7th grade girls and when I am preparing my lessons I find that if I can just take myself back to when I was that age, I remember just how much I thought I knew, but really had no idea about. Even the simple things like what Sabbath is, which is what I taught on this week. If you had asked me what Sunday was for me when I was 11 or 12, I'm sure I would have given you a really good church answer back, but I can tell you now that I hadn't even begun to understand what God's intentions for a lot of things were.

So, before I could teach I had to ask myself that question. What is Sunday to me? Is what I use Sunday for, what God made it for?

"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shall you labor and do your work, but the seventh day is Sabbath, the day of the Lord, your God. In it you shall do no work, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor the stranger within your gates, for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it." -Exodus 20:8-10

Two things I realized from this scripture:

1. God Sanctified Sunday, meaning He set it apart. For me, even though I claim I've made my Sunday about Jesus by going to church and participating in ministry meetings, truthfully it's no different from any other day. I've let those things become just as routine as going to school or work. I think about Luke 10:38-42 where Mary sits at Jesus' feet while Martha is running around doing meaningless tasks. All He wants was exactly what Mary was doing. Just be with Him.

2. The other thing I caught was how we are to keep Sunday holy. I've heard the word holy a thousand times growing up and never really thought about it's meaning until I read Elisabeth Elliot's definition this past summer. She says holy, comes from the root word wholly, which also means complete, hearty or healthy. So, if Sunday is meant to be sanctified and holy, then it should differ form all other days and no matter what happened, what you were going through, sickness, stress, or loss. On Sunday, you can spend time at the Lord's feet and be filled again, and made full.