Living Life for Christ Alone

"A mirror?" She questioned. "You want to show me a mirror?" "Yes, but not just any mirror," He said. He motioned for her to look in the mirror, so she did. It was the same reflection she saw every other time she looked into a mirror, but this time, she looked with the Spirit of Christ alongside her.  "There are many ways you can look at yourself," He spoke gently to her. Peering in, she realized it was true.  Suddenly, she was seeing herself as she imagined others saw her. Some of what she saw made her gasp in horror.  "I did not know I looked like that to them," She thought, "Must I always be conscious of this?" "Ah, but that is not all there is," He said. "Look deeper."  She looked again, but nothing had changed. She shook her head. "I'm not sure how to look deeper."  He reached out and touched a veil that seemed to cover over her face. It was the veil that covered everything about her that ...

 "We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely on God, who raises the dead." (2 Corinthians 1:8b-9) The saying that God will never give us more than we can endure is simply not true.  At times, we get to this place of complete overwhelm beyond what we can endure.  Why? Why would God allow that to happen to His children? Why would God make life -and even survival- impossible for us?  It's quite simple, really.  Overwhelm is when all the temporary fixes we depend on stop working. Overwhelm is when the truth of those temporary fixes sinks in; they are not really fixes at all. Overwhelm is when we can begin to realize we were made to depend on the unseen, eternal God. It is when we are forced to make a choice in response to our own instinct to survive as to who or what we will depend on. It is when we are g...

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." (Gal. 5: 22-23) I should just leave those verses there and hope that a passerby reader might stop and ponder those words for a few moments. Recently, I was pondering Colossians 1:11 where it says in the middle of a long prayer, "Strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness." I had just failed again getting frustrated at a situation that was going on, and went to pray about it when this verse came to mind. One phrase reverberated in my mind: "Patience...with joyfulness." God was telling me,  When your patience is being stretched, you're supposed to be joyful about it...