Month: December 2009 (Page 2 of 4)

Devotions from Just Betweeen Us magazine on envy

Envy is rooted in basic discontent with ourselves and is often expressed through jealousy over someone else’s opportunity.

Each of us is most susceptible to envy in the areas in which we feel most vulnerable or weak.  If we are not at peace with our identity and lack confidence, we may tear down others in an effort to boost our own worth.

We need to investigate the source of our insecurities. We must face our sins and let them come into the light and name them. That self-revelation, repentance, and true humility before God becomes a point of transformation and renewed vision.

A renewed revelation of God’s love for us frees us from the need to be better than someone else and the thirst for recognition and appreciation.   Then our identities will be rooted in our loving relationship with our Father and we will be free of the feeling we need to impress others.
When we know that God loves us unconditionally and wants a intimate relationship, we will experience emotional and spiritual transformation.
“Once we have faced our failures and rediscovered the Father’s love, we will be free to embrace our unique strengths and live in gratitude for God’s special work in us and through us. We will not only serve with humility, but also with confidence that “He who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion.”

Devotions from Mark McMinn’s book, “Finding Our Way Home”

He speaks of Home as the place we all seek-a place of secure love, known most fully in the embrace of God.

We see home in some relationships, when there is compassion, trust, honesty, with places of deep safety and comfort that reflect God’s goodness.

God created us to hunger for shalom, and to turn around, redirect our steps, and find our way home.

Finding our way home requires courage because it involves turning around, looking back, contemplating both pain and joy, and making connections between past and present.

Looking back is not easy because we all have a mixture of goodness and brokenness, but it leads to greater peace than trying to disregard the past.

As we look back it is a spiritual task as we remember God in all of our life. It is a challenge as we will be called to forgive and to be forgiven.

The call home is also the call to discover our true self that God called each of us to be.
I am gaining much from this book and will share more tomorrow.

Devotions from Just Between US magazine on gratitude

Life itself is an incredible gift and we often forget that. In our society there is a hunger for more and more and we have a hard time appreciating all we do have.
Gratitude is to be a way of life we are to cherish what we’ve been given in every single context of it.”
In I Thess 5:18 we are commanded to give thanks in all circumstances for it is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus .
Thanking God in the good times is easy, but how do we do it when life goes terribly wrong? It takes an act of the will- a choice. Often in the dark hours hope is ignited by the very act of gratitude itself. A grateful spirit does wonders for our hearts and outlooks on problems and life in general. Practicing thankfulness helps us move from what isn’t to what is. IT moves our attention to what God is doing wherever we find ourselves.

When we look for God’s hand in the situation, our faith and trust in God gets strengthened and renewed and our heart fills up with thankfulness.

Every day we face the possibility that a blessing on our life may be taken away.  But may we be grateful that we are held by God even then the blessings slip through our fingers. NO matter what happens we are held by God!
The more we demand, complain, worry, the less we can accept and see God’s hand working in our lives.
But by trusting and turning our hearts towards thankfulness, we find what we need to live in the present circumstances whatever they may be.

Devotions from Just Between Us magazine on waiting on God

God often answers our prayers with the four letter word WAIT. Waiting is hard and painful and tiring but it is a discipline that is intended to strengthen us. It is a discipline that produces righteousness and peace. ( Heb. 12:11-12)

While we are waiting we need to spend consistent time in God’s presence, seeking His purpose and reviewing His  promises. God knows us and our situation intimately.
We must not become so obsessed with a “Wait” event in our life, that we miss the other blessings of God. Not only do we need to watch for the blessings in other areas of our lives, but we need to seek out opportunities to help and comfort others.

In James 1 we are told to consider it joy when we go through trials and the discipline of waiting can be a trial. We need to live the abundant life that Jesus promised even while waiting.  Joyful living should not be ‘’paused” like the button on a DVD player while we are waiting. How often do we say we will be happy when we sell the house or get a better job.  We need to practice joy now not when.
Often in hindsight we can see how our character was developed as we waited.
We can focus on our purposes, or we can focus on our problems…one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get our focus off ourselves and onto God and others.

Devotions from an article in Just Between Us on Soul Friendship
Soul friends fight for us to become the person God intended all along, reminding us where we are going. They see who we will be, not necessarily who we are now.

“To truly love someone is to see them as God intended.” Said Dostoyevsky

There is no greater gift than to have a soul friend come along side us and as we journey and to feel our pain and bring us before the Father in love. Just being listened to helps us gather strength.

With a real friend we don’t have to be “fine” We don’t’ have to be someone with all the answers and none of the problems of life. We can be a wreck. They can hold us in our messiness, not feeling like running the other way or trying to fix us up. 

Soul friends hold our hearts and redirect our attention to God and encourage us to hold on.
Chesterton was right: “There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”

Devotions from Leighton Ford’s book, The Attentive Life

God’s love reaches out to us and calls us to our heart’s true home.
“Love is seeking us, the only Love that redeems time, that takes the fragments of what is past and the hope of what is coming, and binds them together in the love of God which is in Christ our Lord.”

A prayer by St. Fursey for this day:
“The arms of God be around my shoulders

the touch of the Holy Spirit upon my head,

the sign of Christ’s cross upon my forehead,

the sound of the Holy Spirit in my nostrils,

the vision of heaven’s company in my eyes,

the conversation of heaven’s company on my lips,

the work of God’s church in my hands,

the service of God and the neighbor in my feet,

A home for God in my heart,

And to God, the Father of all, my entire being.

Yesterday’s sermon spoke especially to me as I had been contemplating these past couple weeks on the Lord singing over me with love, from scripture. I know we all know this in our heads, but do our hearts really know He delights in us and sings over us?  Any way Pastor Thea’s sermon was on music and how the Lord sings over us with love. What confirmation to my heart.

Devotions from Leighton Ford’s book  The Attentive Life

The season of midlife, when the curve of our energy begins to drop, is a time to rest and enjoy the fullness of what life has to offer and to let go of regrets over what may have passed us by. It is not a time of retreat but of renewal, a time to explore and develop new and overlooked parts of ourselves. This is especially the time to make fresh room for God in our heart. It is a time to embrace the now and the inevitable contradictions in ourselves and around us.
Like a rest in a musical score, we pause to come to a stop between light and night, busyness and quietness, between winding up and winding down.

God’s rest for us involves freedom- to trust, to live out His dream for us, to work, create, play , let go, and move on. The rest God offers is the freedom to be fully present in the moment, free to reflect and enjoy what has been; to let go of the deficits and regrets that wear us down; free to envision what will be, what we are being re-created for; free to unburden ourselves of regretful thoughts about our yesterdays and anxious thoughts about our tomorrows.

Thomas Keating says we spend the first part of our lives finding our role-what we are conditioned by our culture to DO- and the next part finding our true selves, what we are called by God to BE.

God puts a sense of eternity in our hearts, and true rest in this life is a foretaste.

May you embrace the day and be present in the moment.

Devotions from Leighton Ford’s book, The Attentive Life

We all go through dark times of doubt, depression, disappointment, betrayal etc  If we learn to embrace our suffering, to carry it rather than lying under its weight and letting ourselves be crushed, then something strange happens.: We have lifted the weight and instead of being crushed by it we find it light-  “My yoke is easy, my burden is light”.

Without the depths, the height would not exist or appear so magnificent.

Where are the spiritual highs and lows in our life? Where was God in all of this?

Corrie ten Boom use to say,” There is no pit so deep that His love is not deeper still.”

The love of Christ is boundless: it is bottomless; it is infinite: it is divine. It passes knowledge.

We will strike the bottom of every other love; but never His love. We will never come to the length, breadth, depth or height of it. To all eternity, the love of Christ to us will be new.

God watches over our heart and mind as a mother hen watches over her chicks.

Thus, we can walk into the darkness rather than to try to outrun it. May we allow ourselves to be transformed by our suffering rather than to avoid it.