Learning

The key to living life, the key to knowing the deepest wells of hope and joy, are not found when all is well: they are found when we trust when all goes wrong.

May all our wells run deep.

It is unavoidable. We are going to suffer. We are going to be obedient and things are going to go wrong. We are going to do exactly what god tells us to do and its not going to end up like we want it to. But the question you are going to have to answer, not with your mind but with your heart, is do you trust Him. At the core of who you are, do you think God is good or do you think that He is evil? Do you own the faith that would say "if this goes wrong," for the rest of my life I believe that He is good. Because the answer and foundation of real life, the kind of life that leaves existence behind and becomes all that God created us to walk in, is not found in wealth and comfort but in trust and faith.

When is the last time you went to church and someone told you that sometimes life sucks?

Ahh, that our wells would go deep, that our hearts could trust Him, even when it all goes wrong. The only other option is to rail against Him.

Some of us have bought into some really crazy thoughts that, because things have gone wrong for us, we've obviously angered God or that we've sinned somehow and this is why God's doing this to us. If you are caught in that trap, you run from God instead of run to Him.

--Matt Chandler

Me: When God teaches me a lesson, it doesn't come quietly or slowly. He slams me in the face.

Why must God continually prove himself to me? Why can't I retain and practice the lesson I have been slammed with over and over?

Why do I constantly rely on my plans, instead of God's, while fully knowing that nothing I put into place will come to fulfillment without His will, influence, and power? Why does He keep working on me, even when I am an unceasing disappointment?

I do not deserve anything, much less the love of an enormous God who loves and cherishes me regardless of: the pastiness of my skin or the number of pimples on my face or the fact that I constantly question Him about my future husband and why I cannot seem to find him or my neverending worries about my family or my inability to say no to people even when I'm beyond exhaustion or my utter lack of faith in ever finding a cure or my insatiable thirst to understand my life and how I can somehow save the world from self destructing, even though I completely comprehend that it already has been saved.

Whoa, listed almost all my insecurities in a nonchalant sorta way.

Back with my face in the dirt. Beginning life without certain constants I have been relying on for the past 10 months.

Back to a different beginning and excited about where it will lead.