Sunday, March 7, 2010

Thank You God


Winters in Wisconsin are gray and drab and dark and gloomy. After days on end of the yuckiness, any glimpse of the sun is enough to make you rejoice.
This past week, God gave us a little bit of reprieve from the winter doldrums and gave us several beautiful days in a row with not only the glorious sunshine, but also some warmth from it as well.
As of today, the yuckiness came back, but I feel as though God has smiled on us here in Wisconsin, and that gives me hope for many more days of sunshine soon.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

The first steps


Man this Faith "thing" can be so hard. If you're a Christian you know in your heart that God will always take care of you. Especially if you're following His plan for your life and you're not trying to make your own decisions.
Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us to trust in the Lord with ALL your heart, lean not on our own understand and in ALL your ways acknowledge Him and He will make straight your paths. What an amazing couple of verses. It tells us exactly how to know the will of God for our lives. My goodness though, how hard it is to do this at ALL times. Some times our humanness sneaks in and we think that we know better and can handle things on our own. Yeah, that may work for a little while, but before long we end up looking around and thinking, "how on earth did I get myself into this mess". THEN we go to God and ask for help. Ahhhh, how much easier our lives would be if first we'd turn to Him and seek His Will for our lives.
Jerry and I have stubbornly repeated the same mistakes over and over and over again. Each time we've managed to dig ourselves out only to fall right back into the same pit. This time around, the pit is so big, and so deep that we cannot even see the light at the top on our own. Of course NOW we're doing all kinds of praying, looking for direction and telling God we're NOW willing to follow His path and do what He wants us to do. How foolish are we that we didn't do this before??? I'm willing to bet that we are not alone in this type of foolishness.
Some of the things that God has made clear that we need to do are things that have been nagging us in the back of our minds for a while now. Things we didn't WANT to do, things that scared us, or made us feel as though we were failures. However, that first step onto God's path for our lives, as scary as it first was, it made the next steps much easier. It was kinda like testing that if we really jumped in with both feet that He was for sure going to catch us and not let us fall. Once we made that first leap and felt His arms embrace us, we weren't so hesitant to jump again and again.
Now, I'm not saying that we won't be foolish at some point again in our lives, cause we're sinners and we will always fall short. However, what an amazing learning experience this has been and continues to be. One of Faith, Trust and Believing that God is who He says He is and He can and WILL do what He says He will.