Living Life for Christ Alone

"'My Lord, why did you bring me here?' 'I wanted you to see this view,' he answered very gently indeed. 'I am looking at it,' she said, just a little breathlessly. 'Tell me, my Lord, what do you see?' He answered slowly and clearly: 'I see the dark places of the earth full of the habitations of cruelty. I see multitudes of human souls fainting and scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd, and I am moved with compassion on them, Grace and Glory.' After a long time, she spoke again, but in a voice so low it was scarcely audible. 'I think I understand, my Lord.'"                    (From Mountains of Spices, by Hannah Hurnard) // "I wanted you to see this view."  I read this after a day of being educated on sexual abuse and trafficking, after a week of catching new glimpses of God's heart towards me as His child, after weeks of studying and learning about trauma and pondering what it will be like to be surrounded ...

 "Come and talk with Me." The whisper of the Father echoes in the mundane. It rustles through the soul in the chaotic.       As I wash dishes...       As I clean up messes...       As I wipe tears over and over...       As I start yet another load of laundry...       As I ponder the things about my children that perplex me...       As I long to go away and be alone...       As I force myself to get up off the couch (after having just sat down) to meet yet another need or to clean up another mess....       As I wonder how to point my children in the right direction...       As I take my daughter to the potty again after just doing it 15 minutes before.       As things I try to get done constantly get interrupted. "Come," He says, "tell me all." But I don't hear. "This doesn't matter very much to Him," I say, "I'm just a mom doing mom t...

"Who will go for Me?" The voice echoes in the chambers of my heart. I raise my hand. "I will go for You, Father."  He smiles and nods. "Yes, you, my daughter, may go for Me."  But as I go on the mission that He has assigned to me I find that I cannot execute it without failure. It seems that the farther I go, the more aware I become of my own weakness.  Shame rises up within. He could have picked someone far more qualified. Why did I volunteer myself to pursue those things that matter to Him when I can't even do it right? I become like Adam and Eve and try to cover up my weaknesses with coverings of my own making. I weave together a covering of self-made righteousness and move further along into the mission assigned to me, but again I trip and fall. Even the self-made righteousness cannot hold me up.  I weave together another covering of more rules to live by -boundaries set to keep me from falling off the pathway and leaving the mission He gave me. Ag...

Have you ever noticed that new seasons of life seem to bring on new failures?  I feel like motherhood and ministry are two places where God has called me to that involve constant change, as well as constant disappointment. "Disappointment in what?" you might be asking. Disappointment in, well, myself.  The older I get (which I'm aware I'm not very old yet), the more I find myself in the stages of life I once dreamed about. And the more I find myself in these stages I once dreamed about, the more I find that it is nowhere near as easy or perfect as I had pictured.  You know that thought you had a long time ago before you were in the season you are in now? The thought that said, "I will do better than they  are doing"?  Yet now, what have those thoughts done for us but point afresh at our imperfections and inability to execute any ideas we had about life perfectly?  Maybe it's not as picture-perfect as you thought.  Maybe you are messing up at every turn...

 "Blessed be... the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation..." -2 Corinthians 1:3-4 All  leaves nothing out.  Perhaps my greatest tribulation at the moment is a mere backache. Or perhaps the time comes when the backache seems like nothing next to extreme loss.  Perhaps the tribulation is a battle in the mind- perplexities, emotions that pull all different directions, confusing thoughts, lies... Or perhaps it is outward circumstances that have you confused.  Perhaps it's extreme difficulty. But more often than not, our tribulations come in small packages that on the outside don't appear very threatening, until we find ourselves overwhelmed afresh with our own inability to take another step.  Whatever the tribulation may be, in every one of them, Jesus draws near in order to comfort. Never will He speak words of condemnation to the soul in distress. His aim is to encourage -which is to infuse with courage - so tha...