Reflection

A beautiful friend of mine likes to do "reflections" where she goes back into her notes and reflects on what God has been teaching her. So this is mine. Near the beginning of last semester I went through a break up and I've written about it a little here, but in that time I began a new prayer journal/notebook/diary whatever you want to call it. Through the many pages, there are themes. In the first few pages, I'm simply hurt. I remember feeling like someone had stabbed me and wouldn't take the knife out. I was constantly asking God "Why? Why was this necessary? What do you have planned through this? Can you really satisfy me?" If you know me at all you know that music means a lot to me. In this time, I clinged on to a song called "Sovereign Over Us" by Aaron Keyes. Some of the lyrics I have written down include

" Your plans are still to prosper. You have not forgotten us. Faithful forever, perfect in love, You are sovereign over us"

" even in the valley You are faithful, You turn it for our good"

And in this time, these words were not so much praise, but me reminding myself the truth of the Word. That there is hope that God is sovereign. There was hope that He is faithful. For a good while I spoke to the Lord about how worthless I felt and how I felt like no one was supporting me. I even felt like God wasn't supporting me, because I knew that He had grace for Daniel and even when I couldn't even begin to imagine what it would be like to forgive him, God already had. I struggled for awhile realizing that even though I felt like a victim, it wasn't about me. It was about God being glorified, no matter how much my pride was hurt. I just wanted God to be the only thing I needed, you know? I knew that to be true in my head, but in my heart what I needed was for people to want me. I needed people to find me worthy of their attention and love. My heart was looking for something more because I felt like there was no way God could fully and truly satisfy me. For most of what  is written in that journal, I'm asking God to change my heart. It thought this would be immediate. I thought that if I just said "hey. I forgive you." that everything would be fine and dandy and all would be well. It wasn't. But that's okay. Because somewhere between "I feel like I'm going to be sick if I ever see him again" and now, God has changed my heart. It was a slow process and I can't tell you exactly when it happened, but I found it to be more true than ever that His love was all I could ever need. I've become excited about my future with Christ and what that will look like. I no longer view my future as being a wife, but as being the Bride of Christ living on mission wherever He leads me. I would love to say that I no longer desire a relationship or marriage, but I can't. There are so many moments when I see how sweet marriage is and how encouraging it can be, and how much I want someone to have an even bigger passion for missions so he can push me in the areas that make me uncomfortable in efforts to push me toward Christ. But even as I write that, I realize that I can find that in this great little gift God's given us called community. Although I don't think that will stifle my desire to one day have a marriage with a Godly man who loves God's people and who loves me, I do think it reminds me that my true satisfaction is found in Jesus and that anything else is just a blessing I can enjoy. It sounds really lame to just say "yeah, God completely satisfies me and I don't want anything else more than Him." and if I said that I would absolutely be lying. I'm not there yet. But I'm closer now than I was 6 months ago. I look to the future excited for what is to come because I know my Father is right there with me guiding me every step of the way, and He'll never let me go.

So it's taken me a long time to get to this point. I'm still not perfect, but hey who is? His plan is the most wonderful plan. He has grown me closer to Him month by month, conversation by conversation, confession by confession, and I have the rest of my life to continue growing and looking back to see how far I've come. Only by God's great love and grace could I ever be able to look back and see that I have in fact moved closer to Him and not further away. He truly is sovereign. I can say that now as worship and praise because I know it to be true through experience. It's no longer something I want to be real in my life. It's there. It's real. He's there. He's real. Seriously, though, how great is that? ahhhhh. marvelous.

Take a second and think about where God has brought you from. Regardless of whether it's been 10 steps in the past 6 monthes or .25 of a step, God's timing and plan is perfect, and I promise you when His plan is revealed, you'll know it never could have gone any other way. 

Following Christ's lead

Ok so I know I never blog here, and I'm pretty sure that all my blogs start out that way and I'm sorry blah blah blah anyway let's get to it.

So tonight my beautiful friend Maggie and I were on the Horseshoe eno-ing (that's a word, right?) and chatting it up and all of a sudden this guy comes over and asks for our permission to snapchat his friend us hanging out in our enos. Apparently he had been living in a hole because he said something to the effect of "This is so weird, I've never seen anyone do this." So I thought he was going to snapchat his friend and then be on his merry little way, but NO. He stays and talks to us for like an hour and a half. It was so cool though because the conversation flowed like we had always known him and like he had always known us. The conversation at one point went to a similarity between a ritual they do on certain Indian reservations and Christ's death on the Cross. The whole conversation my thought process was "This is so weird. He shouldn't be talking to us. Why is he still here? Does he love Jesus? I don't think he does. I should tell him about Jesus." In that part of the conversation it would have been the perfect time to talk about Jesus and our faith and whatever, but did I do it? NO. And now, I'm sitting here with no way to ever get in touch with him again, feeling like I missed an opportunity, which I totally did. I felt God tugging at my heart to share the Gospel with him, and I didn't. I know that my sinful self cannot and will not change what God has planned, so if Austin (the guy we met) is supposed to have a relationship with Jesus, someone else will come along who is much more faithful than me and point him to Christ. So that leaves me with why I was met with this opportunity to share Christ and failed to do so. Honestly here is what I think, and please tell me if this is unbiblical:

Obviously, mine and Maggie's conversation with Austin was no mistake or accident. God doesn't play those games. Whether or not I shared Christ with him is irrelevant, because God was going to use this situation to teach me something either way. If I had talked to him about Jesus and grace he could have accepted it and began a relationship with Christ which would have been awesome. He also could have said no or gone off and thought about it more, yada yada, many things could have resulted from that conversation. But that conversation did not occur, and in this I'm being taught something. I have this guilt of not following God's lead and realizing that I missed an opportunity to be missional where I am which is something I've been working on and God's been convicting me about. From now on in coversations though, I'll remember this feeling and how being faithful would have resulted in much better things. Although I should have gave him the Good News of the Gospel, God still used that strange conversation to teach me what it looks like to take strange things like that and use them for the glory of God. I feel like in the future I'll be more aware of these things and follow God's lead. But even when I fail and don't, there is grace for me, and God loves me the same in my failure as He does in my successes. Because even though I was unfaithful tonight, He will never be unfaithful, and His plan never fails.

That was mostly be trying to figure out my feelings about tonight and see what God was trying to teach me through it. If it taught you something, awesome. If it didn't teach you anything, that's cool too. I hope it was a good story. Jesus loves you all. I love you all. And maybe one day we'll have that conversation about who Jesus is and how good His always is. Peace out home skillets.