eureka

Well, its been a while since I posted. I never have been good at writing consistently in a blog or a diary of any kind, but that's alright.. I've been doing fairly well at keeping up with what I've been wanting to do.. well, except for working out, I haven't worked out once since I started this, but I plan to start that this week. It's been busy since my last entry, Isaiah's 2nd birthday was on Saturday so I was getting ready for that. I just kept it to family basically, but there were still seventeen people in my livingroom, so that took some pretty creative rearranging, but we managed. I think I managed to get it set so it didn't feel too cramped, I took all the toys out of my livingroom and had the couches and chairs around the perimeter of the room, so that definitely made getting around a lot easier.

So I've been doing a Bible study by Beth Moore, she is one of my all time favorite Christian authors. She just writes in such a refreshing style. Reading one of her books is much like sitting down and having coffee with a girlfriend, she's just so real. One of her books that I would highly recommend is called "Get Out of that Pit".. it was an awesome, eye-opening book. She talks about how we get stuck in proverbial "pits" in our life, and about how there are three different kinds, one's we slip into, one's we're pushed into, and one's we willingly jump into... definitely worth reading! Anyway, I've been doing her David study... you know, we all grew up with the story David and Goliath and we all know the story of David and Bathsheba, but Beth Moore really gets you thinking critically and putting it into the context of "this really happened" as opposed to it being just a good story in an old book. I was reading about Goliath and how huge he was. You know he was over nine feet tall? His armor weighed more than I do! It was the weight of TWO of me actually! ... and David, then a teenager, walked up to him confidently with five little stones, a slingshot and NO armor and killed him. I mean, just taking a moment to think about the magnitude of that is humbling. I can NOT imagine walking up to someone who is nearly four feet taller than me and carrying a sword AND a javelin, with only a slingshot, and boldly telling him that God would give me the victory. It got me thinking about the "giants" in my own life. The battles I have right now that just seem so overwhelming... it made me stop and consider just where I was putting my faith. I get overwhelmed and frightened and I allow myself to cower in fear, but I've got the same God today that David had with Goliath... and when David walked up to Goliath he was NOT timid about what he was there to do... he walked up to him and BOLDLY told him that God would deliver him into his hand that day... I mean, can you IMAGINE saying that? He had an understanding of who God is that I want. I think the "ah ha" came when I realized, I CAN have that... That's what God wants for us, he wants us to know he's there for us in our battles, that they're not our fights, they're his.. and if we would just allow him to work in our circumstances he would bring down the Goliaths in our lives too.
However, it's easy to have a eureka moment, I find it quite difficult to allow myself to reside in that moment. I know where my faith should be, I know God is bigger, but I get stuck in what I can and can't see and then panic. My endeavor is, however, to remember that God is big enough and powerful enough in ALL areas of my life. I was talking to someone a little while ago and she was telling me about something she'd heard about the scripture that says "be anxious for nothing, but in all things, with prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving bring your requests to God. And the Peace which passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:6-7) She was talking about how in the Greek (or Hebrew, I forget) the phrase "Be anxious for nothing" was actually a verb. Now being fascinated by linguistics my ears perked up and I started thinking about the sentence structure. "BE anxious" means you're ACTIVELY doing something, so "Be anxious for nothing"... that means we've got to consciously act on it. Anxiety is something that comes naturally, but to be anxious for nothing takes work. When I was in Bible College (for a VERY short stint) I was taking a Bible Research course, and they taught us to take special notice of certain words when we were reading. The word AND after it says to bring our requests to God... its not a condition, its a promise...but it requires an action on my part. So God promises that IF I bring my requests to him with thanksgiving, he WILL guard my heart and my mind. I think I get so caught up sometimes in how bad things can get that I forget to go to God with them. I allow myself to stress till I'm physically ill, and its not good. So my plan for this week is to remind myself when I'm stressing, to just take a minute out and thank God that HE is in control, not me, and that He has promised to work "all things together for good to them that love [Him]..." (Romans 8:28).

So, as we can see, I have been keeping up on my devotions, not "everyday", but I've definitely done better in the last few weeks than I have in the last few years. It is definitely something I need lately. I don't know how to cope without it right now.

Anyway, besides that... I was chatting with a girlfriend on Friday night, we got to talking about writing. I can't remember how the topic came up, but it did, and we wound up digging out some of my old writings... dating all the way back to 1996!! Lol, I was just a little kid! Some of them were hilarious, my messy scrawl on these diary pages, each entry labeled "Dear Diary"... then they moved on to some very personal and heart rending entries I'd written later in my life during some very broken times... then we moved on to some of my writing from college. It was a blast! I'd forgotten how much my writing style has changed since college, my vocabulary has slipped astronomically! My sentence structure was just so elegant at times. I think I would definitely like to go through and try to arrange my writings chronologically and perhaps get them into the computer and compile a complete set, arranging them by type and date. I have some prose, some poetry... a bit of everything really. I am quite excited about the idea of perhaps starting some writing again. I mean, something other than just blogging... just writing from my heart.. its been a long time!