And when the rain falls down You know the flowers are gonna bloom And when the hard times come You know the teacher's in the room Excerpt: MICHAEL FRANTI - HAVE A LITTLE FAITH LYRICS To say this past month has been an emotional rollercoaster would be an understatement. I stay very busy between job hunting, my internship and other projects I have on the burner, but my addiction has been making a very convincing play for my life. I find that nights are the worst, which is when I would typically drink. I am also in amazement at how quickly I am returning to the person I was ten years ago. I thought I had evolved, but it turns out I was just drunk all this time. Today happens to be a good day and by that I mean that the monster living somewhere inside me is asleep. I see my addiction as this little green monster that stays locked up in a cell and from time to time he wakes up and throws a temper tantrum, which is when I crave like a crazed maniac. I just have to remember that if I feed the monster, he will get bigger and eventually break out of the cell and destroy my body and my life. But, if I do not feed the monster, his temper tantrum will eventually give way and he will give up and go back to sleep. The key is to not feed him. I recently read in 2 Corinthians that Paul talks about feeling as though the end is near, feeling as though there is no way out, but that his God continually rescues him. This made me think about my own cravings because when they come, they come strong and hard and I feel as though I will die if I don’t drink. It occurred to me that during these times I need to just talk to God about what I’m feeling and ask Him to handle that monster. I find that sometimes, just talking to God about my cravings and the fear and depression that comes with them can help restore some of my sanity. It also occurred to me that if I am having a craving when I have somewhere to be and feel too overwhelmed to go, I should make the decision to do nothing more than show up and tell God that He will have to handle the rest. Just showing up, after all, is something I can handle regardless of my state of being and I have found that when I am honest with God, He tends to honor my weakness by adding His own touch to the situation whether it be a friendly person, an easy on ramp, a parking spot right in front of the door or a renewed mind and spirit, I find that He shows up when I do. In fact, this entire post is an example of God honoring my weakness in that I honestly chose to sit at the computer even though I didn’t think I had anything to say for this month. With holiday season nipping at our heels, it turns out this is a great time to post about reliance on God. If you have a roof over your head, food on your table and people that love you then be THANKFUL for the gifts God has given you because these things we refer to as necessities really are nothing more than gifts from our Heavenly Father. If you are lacking in one or all of these departments don’t feel bad or unworthy. Instead, turn yourself over to God all day everyday, surrender to His will and ask for His plans for you. I have no doubt that He will see you through not only this holiday season, but through the rest of your life as well. Let me just put it this way, if He still has a plan for my self-sabotaging and addicted butt, then He has to have a plan for you too so talk to Him daily, get in His word and just keep showing up. Do these things and let him do the leading and you will have peace in knowing you are exactly where you are meant to be in order for His plan to unfold in your life.
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If God is still talking… then He hasn’t given up on you yet and if you are a believer in God, then you should know that coincidences are the actual footprints of God in our lives. So with that said, you don’t open up to the same page in a book twice and think nothing of it… at least I don’t. I was actually browsing books for a gift and happened upon a title that caught my eye. I took the book off the shelf, opened it up, appalled at the topic it opened to, shut it quickly and put it back on the shelf. I continued browsing books and eventually came back to the first book. I again, took the book off the shelf, opened it up to the exact same page and thought “Ok, maybe I need to read this” and so I did. As with many stories I have to take you back to the beginning, which would be the prior evening.
I was in bed reading Joel Osteen’s book, It's Your Time. One of the main themes of the book is along the lines of as long as you are doing your best for God, He will create doors where walls once stood. That particular night a sentence jumped out at me. That sentence read: Your attitude determines whether you move forward in God’s divine plan or whether you stay put. The next day while driving home from work I turned the radio dial to 95.7 to hear a daily broadcast from Bishop Brandon Porter. His message that day was in regards to how ‘our little is preparing us for our lot’ and that when God gives us something, whether it be a small thing or a huge thing, we are suppose to make it better than it was before. In other words, we are suppose to do our best for God knowing that there is a reason this task was given to us and not someone else. This reminds me of Steve Jobs when he said you just have to have faith that the dots are going to connect somewhere in the future. Anywho, like I said I was driving home and on the way I stopped by Barnes & Noble to pick up a book for my mother. I was actually planning on picking up Joyce Meyer’s Battlefield of the Mind Devotional, but the store did not have it in stock and so as I browsed the rest of her books my eye immediately fell on Be Anxious For Nothing. After opening up to the same page twice I decided to read that page against my will and it told me that while we are waiting on the Lord we are suppose to bear the fruits of the Spirit and not walk around angry, miserable and defeated. Hmmm…. Right then and there I knew God was really speaking to me. I had recently told Him that while I used to pride myself on being on the scenic route in life that I was no longer enjoying the ride and that I was ready for the direct route. I told Him I had goals that I wanted to accomplish and that I was even interested in having a husband, possibly even a family and a place to call my own where I don’t get attacked for putting too much of my stuff in the fridge. Most of my friends spent their twenties climbing the ropes in their preferred careers whereas I spent my twenties doing everything but my preferred career. My friends are now enjoying the fruit of their labor while I have a whole lot of labor and absolutely no fruit: Nothing to be proud of or enjoy. I feel like I’ve been on a loopty loop for ten years, seriously. Interestingly enough, it was the very day that I said this to God that all of the above began. I personally believe that God is trying to tell me that the key to my getting off of the loopty loop and boarding the express rail is to start producing the fruit of the Spirit and keep producing them no matter what. And I do have to admit that it has been these last ten years of personal and career dissatisfaction that have helped me get rid of the shyness and timidness that plagued me for most of my younger years. In fact, I can say that had I not had these ten years of “ugh” I would not be mentally, emotionally and spiritually ready for where I am headed. I can also say that even though I personally did not care for what I did career wise, I sure did learn a whole lot that I can take with me because everything I’ve done is of the universal kind. From overhauling a human resource department to helping run a utility construction office, I’ve either worked in or been exposed to every possible department within a business and I have a feeling that this experience is what is going to land me my next job only this time I’ll be in a preferred position, within a preferred company and in a preferred industry. I will have gotten off the loopty loop, boarded the express rail and finally be in a position to make something of this life that I am living. But as God has beaten over my head, it all starts with the fruit. Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-Control…These are the fruits of the spirit and we are to produce them no matter what. Life doesn’t wait to start until you are in your perfect position so neither should your production of spiritual fruit. You just have to know that where you are right now is preparing you for where you are going and once you get there you’ll have the ability to look back and just marvel at how much God knows and just how much we do not. And sense I'm being honest here, I do have to admit that this post was birthed about a month ago and there have been several instances since then where God has tapped me on the shoulder regarding the whole doing your best for Him no matter how much you detest your current circumstances. As far as He is concerned until you are out of those circumstances you are suppose to be doing your best for Him no matter how much you want to burn down that building, shoot that boss or strangle that coworker. And wouldn't you know, here I sit about 8:45 pm on May 30th half listening to Piers Morgan Tonight while reading through this post very aware of a slight stay of execution regarding my move west and BAM! Crap! I mean if I'm going to put something in my blog I should be practicing that which I preach so I am going to do my best from this day forward to be my best in my current so-ready-to-be-out-of-here circumstance until I am actually out of the circumstance and if I happen to find myself in another similar position until I get my footing in Los Angeles, then so be it. I 'll just keep producing spiritual fruit knowing at some point the tides will turn and I will get the personal and career satisfaction I desire. P.S. All praying folk are welcome to pray for traveling mercies as I make my way across the country sometime this month and while you're at it… a job with benefits would be nice too! Love, Light & Laughter to all my readership! This post was birthed from conversations with some of my Agnostic and Non-Religious friends. I have to admit that I do not have many Atheist friends. I believe it has something to do with the fact that I don’t believe in Atheism, which makes them mad and I find this hilariously ironic.
These friends have mentioned on many an occasion that they don’t understand how heartache and pain can be a part of God’s plan for our lives. I don’t claim to have the answers, but I can share a bit of what I have found along my own journey. If you are like me, you have heard the phrase “Father God” many a time from the pulpit, in a prayer or in a Bible study book. We love to call God our Father, but we don’t like for Him to act like one, do we? In adolescence we grow to dislike our fathers because they are often the symbol of discipline in our lives. They punish us when we do something that is not in our best interest, they give us chores to teach us about responsibility, they give us boundaries in terms of activities and amount of time spent with friends, they may monitor what we eat, how much we study and what television shows we watch. Of course, as we enter adulthood and become parents ourselves, we realize that all of those things our fathers did that annoyed or infuriated us were only meant to protect us and to keep us on a path that would lead to personal success. Since God made man in His image, not a perfect image, but still in His image…God is our heavenly Father. There are times in our lives when He knows that it is better to let us learn on our own rather than explicitly telling us something just like our own earthly parents have done. A non-religious lady I will not name recently shared that she did not understand why God did not answer her cries for help on an important business decision where she and her husband ended bottom up thanks to a shrewd and not absolutely legal real estate agent. She recalls driving an hour to see this building in the hot summer heat of southern Florida. She asked God repeatedly something along the lines of “I know I don’t talk to You often, but if You are there and if You are listening and if You are God…I really need You to help us know if we should move on this property and if we should do business with this man.” A long story made short, she and her husband did business with this man without seeing the contract and paid for it dearly. Could God have made her feel uneasy? Yes, but she will never do any sort of business deal again with not only seeing the contract herself, but having it looked over by a trusted attorney. In my view, she learned a very valuable lesson by a God who was doing nothing more than being a Father to her and her husband. While they did loose quite a bit of money, they did not loose everything and they rebounded shortly after much smarter than they started out. Other times God acts like God and He provides opportunities for us to make u-turns in order to get off the wrong road we are on. I can recall a moment in time when I was bound and determined to do something I whole heartedly regret involving myself and a man that was not my own. On the way to dinner that evening, I literally hit two roadblocks and a detour and I have to admit that the thought that God was trying to stop me did enter my mind. Unfortunately, I did not listen. While both of these scenarios involve God allowing our misdirection or sin to culminate in unwelcome consequences, what they do not do is make us pay the ultimate price. God in His loving kindness brought His own Son to earth for the purpose of taking on all of the earth’s sin. God’s Son, whom I call Yeshua, came to earth to take on my sin and your sin so that we do not have to pay the ultimate consequence for our misguided actions, which is eternal death. Yes, there are bad things in this world and yes, we do experience heartache, but we experience these things not because God designed them, but because sin is active in our world. How glorious it will be to experience an earth with no tears! Instead of giving us what we actually deserve God offers us the ultimate reward and all we have to do is accept it. Praise be to God who blesses us according to our ability to accept His gifts and administer them appropriately.
Sounds great doesn’t it? But if you look deeper you will realize that wanting something and being ready for something are two very different things. I personally believe that God has a giant storehouse of blessings for each of us. Unfortunately, most of us only receive a minute portion of those blessings due to the simple fact that we are not ready for the majority of what He wants to do in our lives. A wise Rabbi once said, “God will give you the small things to see if He can trust you with the big things. You’re responsibility with those small things is to show God that you can be trusted with the big gifts He has planned for you.” It’s scary really, to think of the possibility that many of the things we are begging God for are being withheld for our own good since we are not ready for them. What’s even harder to conceptualize is that we should be grateful for this. After all, what good is getting everything we’ve ever wanted if we are not ready and fully equipped to handle it? I cannot offer a one size fits all way to prepare for God’s blessings, as we are each on our own path with our own obstacles. What I can say is this: every single one of us is fully capable of tuning in to hear God speak to us and I have no doubt that He speaks much more often than most of us realize. Sometimes it is a small voice in the back of our minds, other times it is a strong gut reaction, or a desire for a specific cause. God has equipped each of us with a certain set of talents, skills and interests and it is usually within these three that we find our purpose, that one thing in life that propels us forward no matter what happens to be going on around us. If you have not found that one thing that propels you forward, then I urge you to have the courage to explore your talents, skills and interests…even the ones that do not earn you “cool” points. If also urge you to simply ask God to make your purpose known to you. I have no doubt that He will answer you…It may take a while, especially if you are not ready…but never stop seeking…If there is one thing I do know it is that He will answer you, no matter where you are on your journey. It’s funny, so many Christians seem to think that acknowledging that God exists and that Yeshua is His Son is the end of the journey, when in all actuality, it is only the beginning. This Thanksgiving let’s all choose to be Thankful for both the blessings we have been given and those blessings that God intends to give us somewhere down the road once we are ready for them. Let’s also make a point to start asking God to direct our steps equipping us with what we need in order to accept all He has to offer us. A few prayers I say aloud every day on the way to work are: The Prayer of Jabez “Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause any pain!” And: May Your will be done in my life and on this planet, completely uncontested, just as it is done in Heaven. Last: My Father, My King, Have mercy on me, even though I have no worthy deeds, answer me and save me. I wish each of you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving regardless of where you are on your journey. |
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