Some situations make you feel like you’re in a paper bag that you SHOULD be able to break out of, but can’t.
Continue reading “Perseverance?!”Perseverance?!
PsedoPsalm 1:1
You know those problems in kids tests where they have to draw a line between column A and column B to match things that go together?
If one of those existed at the beginning of the year, showing me A) Stuff I’ve prayed about and B) How God would answer/fulfil/progress them, I could NEVER have matched up those pairs.
He is stunning.
He is amazing.
He pulls rabbits out of hats and carnations out of sleeves.
He is behind and before.
He’s in the heights and the depths.
He totally knocks my socks off.
PsedoPsalm 1:1
A different kind of prayer
A verse I’ve been thinking on a bit this holidays is Malachi 3:16
Years ago I made a new friend when she shifted to the hills, came to our church and asked our then minister for someone to meet and pray with… he put her in touch with me and we became deep, instant and now longtime friends as we met together to pray every fortnight or so for several years. Our third was a baby when we met, and she came and prayed and chatted and folded washing with me through the births of the next 3 kids.
Continue reading “A different kind of prayer”Honesty
I have tried for so many years to get things right. Still do in many ways but there was a specific moment in time when I not only knew God was God over muddles and imperfection and it was that moment the striving stopped. Things were a muddle. I couldn’t unmuddle it. And I finally threw myself into His bigness, full of need and the most honest I’d probably ever been with myself.
This was a VSP – Very Short Post 🙂
Emptying prayers
I have been a bit ‘stuck’ on the topic of prayer for a while. A few months ago at church I became a bit un-stuck. As in, no longer stationary as WELL as a bit unglued emotionally.
Continue reading “Emptying prayers”Changing focus
Years ago when I was finding some stuff really heavy going, I heard something that impacted my prayers, life and expectations so deeply it has stayed with me ever since. Prior to that moment, I spent most of my prayer time asking God to fix things, change things, alter circumstances, make people be a certain way… FIX things… amke it hurt less or be less hard… you know the drill…
With what was happeneing at the time, I was ripe ready for the words that I heard in church one day. It was my brother in law Paul talking as he led the service that day. I’m sure I’ll get some details wrong here but the essence remains true.
He spoke of his Dad who’d fought in The War. On the night before armed combat Pauls Dad prayed “don’t let me be a coward”.
Wow.
I’d have been begging to live, to get outa there, for everything to go away and not be true. I was amazed at the contrast of my lesser hardships and style of prayer to that situation and those words.
Since then it has been part of me to ask less for my list of what I think God should do, and more to ask Him to fill me with courage come what may. To thank Him for His promise to equip me do do His will and to work in me what is pleasing to Him. I’ve often wished that those moments with God, where He changes something so big in me in the blink of an eye- would happen more often. Maybe they can, should or will… but I’m so glad for these times that crop up like oasis in a desert. Often at the last gasp – there comes the Living Water.