license plates, ugly shirts, a sore foot, and prayers (updated)
Updates to this post are in blue text so you don't have to re-read the whole thing!
At any given moment my life is a mass of controlled Chaos. Today's story is about organizing that chaos into manageable chunks.
My foot hurts and the struggle began today with "Just stay home. Your foot hurts." Well, I'm not staying home, I'm going to church. I know on struggle days, the last place I want to go is the first place I need to be. I bypassed sore foot. It hurts but not bad enough that I can't go and worship God.
I wore my ugly shirt today. For no other reason than I felt like it. It seemed like an ugly shirt day but I like my ugly shirt. To me it's not ugly. On the way to church I heard a song on the radio that's not played often but applies to me. It's called I'm Not Who I Was. It has a little bit of a backstory for me that I'm not going to share. I could have made it the rest of the day without hearing that song and sometimes these little things that happen remind me of the backstories.
There are a lot of people from Wyoming in Ogden on any given day. It's just an observation. There are also at least three from Oregon that I saw yesterday driving around. Another observation.
I've had a restless spirit as I mentioned. I did some looking and what I discerned is that sometimes God causes restlessness before He does what He's getting ready to do. I did the best thing that I could and tried to hear what God was telling me. What I heard was what I wanted God to tell me and I knew it. There will be the earthquake and the fire and the flood, and then the still, small voice. I think I'm in the noisy part. Jeremiah had this happen to him; there were these things that he couldn't hear God during, but then there was the still, small voice. I was reminded of that again today (made twice this week) in church.
The sermon touched on some truth that I think we often overlook, which is that if Heaven is real, then so is Hell and where we spend eternity is a choice we make here. I've read the descriptions in the Bible of both and for the life of me I cannot understand why one would pick hell over Heaven. I sometimes wonder if being an American who has rights is a stumbling block to choosing Jesus, in that mindset that "nobody's going to tell me what to do". That's a different story for a different day but I got some pointers on how to share with friends who boast about their final destination being hell. I think that they honestly haven't thought about the eternal implications of that; just the earthly ones.
What hit me was what was prayed for during our time to share joys and concerns with the congregation. I mentioned a while back that I'm limiting the "random" Scripture reading these days to help me not be so confused about what happens in my life. In my purposeful reading, I'm still working on reading a different translation of Scripture and in this particular edition of the Bible, it has daily devotionals. One of these caught my eye and I read it last night and again today as providence would have it (yesterday's and today's Psalms readings are on the same page). It was about a man who did something he didn't want to do for three years and his struggles with it. One day he didn't want to go to the office and on his way he felt the urge to just switch directions and run for it. Then something told him to pull to the side of the road where he heard a voice say "My Son struggled in ways you can't imagine. He turned to Me then and you should too". The man cried, then pulled himself together and went to the office where in one day everything was cleared up and set right. In just one day!
Can you guess what I'm praying for?
I would love for today to be that day, where God just shows me that doors are either closed or open and that path I should be on would become clear as day! During the prayer time, I didn't speak up but it's like the pastor had a window into every single thing that was on my heart that I would have prayed for myself.
I would so love that "God Thing" in my life where all the noise and confusion becomes clear; I don't even need to understand why it happened, just that the path would become clear as day! Maybe today will be that day for me.
It sure started out that way!
At any given moment my life is a mass of controlled Chaos. Today's story is about organizing that chaos into manageable chunks.
My foot hurts and the struggle began today with "Just stay home. Your foot hurts." Well, I'm not staying home, I'm going to church. I know on struggle days, the last place I want to go is the first place I need to be. I bypassed sore foot. It hurts but not bad enough that I can't go and worship God.
I wore my ugly shirt today. For no other reason than I felt like it. It seemed like an ugly shirt day but I like my ugly shirt. To me it's not ugly. On the way to church I heard a song on the radio that's not played often but applies to me. It's called I'm Not Who I Was. It has a little bit of a backstory for me that I'm not going to share. I could have made it the rest of the day without hearing that song and sometimes these little things that happen remind me of the backstories.
There are a lot of people from Wyoming in Ogden on any given day. It's just an observation. There are also at least three from Oregon that I saw yesterday driving around. Another observation.
I've had a restless spirit as I mentioned. I did some looking and what I discerned is that sometimes God causes restlessness before He does what He's getting ready to do. I did the best thing that I could and tried to hear what God was telling me. What I heard was what I wanted God to tell me and I knew it. There will be the earthquake and the fire and the flood, and then the still, small voice. I think I'm in the noisy part. Jeremiah had this happen to him; there were these things that he couldn't hear God during, but then there was the still, small voice. I was reminded of that again today (made twice this week) in church.
The sermon touched on some truth that I think we often overlook, which is that if Heaven is real, then so is Hell and where we spend eternity is a choice we make here. I've read the descriptions in the Bible of both and for the life of me I cannot understand why one would pick hell over Heaven. I sometimes wonder if being an American who has rights is a stumbling block to choosing Jesus, in that mindset that "nobody's going to tell me what to do". That's a different story for a different day but I got some pointers on how to share with friends who boast about their final destination being hell. I think that they honestly haven't thought about the eternal implications of that; just the earthly ones.
What hit me was what was prayed for during our time to share joys and concerns with the congregation. I mentioned a while back that I'm limiting the "random" Scripture reading these days to help me not be so confused about what happens in my life. In my purposeful reading, I'm still working on reading a different translation of Scripture and in this particular edition of the Bible, it has daily devotionals. One of these caught my eye and I read it last night and again today as providence would have it (yesterday's and today's Psalms readings are on the same page). It was about a man who did something he didn't want to do for three years and his struggles with it. One day he didn't want to go to the office and on his way he felt the urge to just switch directions and run for it. Then something told him to pull to the side of the road where he heard a voice say "My Son struggled in ways you can't imagine. He turned to Me then and you should too". The man cried, then pulled himself together and went to the office where in one day everything was cleared up and set right. In just one day!
Can you guess what I'm praying for?
I would love for today to be that day, where God just shows me that doors are either closed or open and that path I should be on would become clear as day! During the prayer time, I didn't speak up but it's like the pastor had a window into every single thing that was on my heart that I would have prayed for myself.
I would so love that "God Thing" in my life where all the noise and confusion becomes clear; I don't even need to understand why it happened, just that the path would become clear as day! Maybe today will be that day for me.
It sure started out that way!
Comments
Post a Comment