Finally a Breakthrough

O MY GOODNESS!!! I feel so beyond renewed. God has been working furiously in my life these past few months and I am finally being able to see it. After spending a most amazing week at home with my beautiful family, I had the most incredible honor of leading one of my most beloved friends to a faith in Christ. It has been the most beautiful experience watching her resist Him, warm up to Him, accept Him, and now grow in Him. If anything, through all of this, God has taught me my own insignificance. In that, I was putting so much weight on my failures and mistakes, thinking they were keeping me from connecting with my Father. How important I thought myself that something I do keeps Him from working in and through me...I was so mistaken. In fact, through my failures and inadequacy he worked through me to touch someone's heart and woo them to a love for Him. I am far too small to mess up God's plan, and not only did he decide to work despite my mistakes, but He USED me through my mistakes. O how glorious He is! He promises to equip us and be strong in our weakness and that has been so evident to me.
Furthermore, I have learned so much about what it means to love someone. Befriending this girl, I had no ulterior motive other than love her. I wasn't loving her so that she would become a Christian or so that she would see Christ in me. These were definitely important and came into play, but I befriended her simply because I loved her. And I would love her just as much if she never prayed to receive Christ. God requests that we love Him and love others. He doesn't grant us the right to judge others or the power to save others. just love them. And through our honest, unyielding love (that we only receive because of Him) He will shine through and touch that persons heart. It isn't about giving someone a bible, or telling them God loves them...those things are and can be important, but its just about being there for people when they need someone. Why do we complicate it to more than that? God will do His work. His plan will happen. All we need to do is just what he asks: love. Let's not make it more than that. I feel like if everyone understood that all the time, myself included, (not meaning to throw out a cliche) the world would be a better place. So I challenge you to reevaluate how you treat people. Everyone you come into contact with. Do you love them? Do you edify them with your words? What about the people you interact with and don't even speak to? Would a smile or kind "Hello" change their day or perhaps even their life for the better? My goal is to let God's love run through me fully. I want to shine love to every single person I see every single day. In Ephesians we are told to speak to one anther in psalms and hymns, give thanks, walk as we are in the light, find what is acceptable to God, redeem the time, understand God's will, be filled with the Spirit, Sing to the Lord, Be renewed, put on righteousness and holiness, give to those in need, edify with our words, be kind and forgive, be imitators of god and WALK IN LOVE...

The calm before the storm

These past few weeks have been complete hell. I keep referencing previous blogs but...It works...When I wrote my last blog, I had no idea what was ahead of me. Here it is, March...and I can safely say February was the worst month of my life. January 30th I was ready to turn my life around, be the woman I have been growing into all these years, but some hard stuff hit me and I realized how little I put my trust in God. It was easy for me to trust him when life was going well, but when the going got tough and I couldn't handle it, I crumbled. I turned to everything but Him. At this point I can't promise a turn around. It's my desire, but I am afraid these unfulfilled promises to God on my part are getting a little tired. Last week I hit the darkest place in my life i have every been. Battling some pretty scary depression, God used some friends to wake me up and pull me back. I am getting there. I feel better than I have in a long time. I have found happiness but realized tonight that I have been trying to change based off feeling for quite some time now. What I need is to embrace God's joy. I miss that. I have known a verse in Philippians since I was 15...."Be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer and supplication let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will be made known to you"...I may have butchered that verse a little, I am going off of pure memory. However, knowing these words in my head and not believing them in my heart has been one of my biggest pretends. I want to stop having the head knowledge of Christ and instead embrace his truth and believe it...believe meaning trust in it, not have the intelligence of it...guess we shall see...