The Lord above has been teaching me so much these last months. Years, really. Life had been rolling along smoothly. A little scare would crop up here and there, but nothing materialized into anything real difficult.
We were driving down the highway with the top down and the sun shining in, singing along to our favorite songs. That's how I see us back then. We were in our 20's, and we lived well. We took lots of trips. We entertained friends in our home. We worked hard and played hard. It was a good life. It was an easy life.
Toward the end of that decade, we had babies. Three awesome little blessings in four years. We continue to be overwhelmed with how good God has been to us through our children. We did nothing to deserve them.
After the babies came, we had a little scare. For me, it was actually a really big scare. A life and death scare. A chance to test the amount of faith in me. I walked around for two weeks after Skylar's birth, wondering if cancer was invading my body. Then I endured the needles in my neck for the biopsy. Needles are one of my great fears! But then, the phone call set me free. It was a nodule that mostly amounted to nothing.
But I wasn't really free. The Lord was just preparing me for more life, more tests, more faith, more trust. And he used that time to change me deep down.
One of the great outcomes of my cancer scare was that I started thinking about other people who are in pain, and my heart started to break for them. This life is hard for a lot of folks, and I just started seeing it, seeing them. We have it so plush and comfortable here, and I guess I developed a habit of looking away when things were too hard to see.
Hungry children. People with true physical difficulties. People who want more of God yet can't even own a Bible. Abused girls and women right here in the States. Emotional wounds affecting people's every day lives. People who don't know Jesus... It all started slapping me in the face on a weekly basis, and I stopped turning my head. I started asking God, "What can I do?"
I have so much still to learn here. Some great and beautiful truths are coming to light for me, and very sad realities too. In the next couple of posts, I will share with you a little of the journey I've been walking through and some of the things I'm learning. I don't plan to depress you, but God needed to break my heart for others. This is the road He has me on. I hope you will be encouraged!
If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us.
***For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.***
Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
1 John 3:17-18, NIV
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