Sometimes, I find myself particularly tired of my place in life… and then it hits me: I want it now. I want my portion now. I have been promised an inheritance, and I’m tired of waiting. Oh God, have mercy on me. It all begins when I start to think about the things that I do, the places I’ve been, the person I’ve become, and I look at all of the people who just don’t care, all of the opportunities that never presented themselves, all...
"In continuing this series on prayer, I wanted to focus on abiding in God's presence. Writing on this subject, my friend Maria Viola offers her intimate, insightful perspective from her experience of God in the quite place."
—David Andrew The Quiet Place We can learn to abide in God’s presence wherever we go, in any situation, in whatever we are doing. There is a starting point: being in the prayer closet. I cannot stress enough the...
To kick off this series on prayer, I want to focus on the experience of prayer. To express this sentiment, I have asked my dear friend Rachel Jackson to pen a creative piece on her experience of prayer. So without further ado:
Prayer.
Oh, I know this place so well;
The place we come to meet.
Oh, I know the way He looks at me
When I dance before Him, free.
Oh I know the path so well;
The path we walk upon.
Oh, I know it won’t be very long
Till...
Lately, I have felt God pressing on my heart to stop asking Him for stuff. It all falls in line with my last two posts actually. I've been feeling challenged to pray only in thankfulness and adoration of Who God is and of His qualities as revealed in Scripture and my daily life. For the course of this next school year, when I go to pray, I will only thank God for Who He is and proclaim His character over my circumstances. At the very least, this...
I've been hearing a lot of messages lately about God's love. God's love. God's affection. As one speaker put it, the word love is used so much that it fails to impact us the way it should when used in regard to the way God feels about us. God is affectionate toward us. Affectionate. Yet even this word seems dead to me, or I to it. Should that move me to cry to God for a heart that can respond to Him? In some small way, it does. Maybe if I start...
Transition: that's what my life has been about it seems. From as early as I can remember, I have always had changes in my life. Sometimes they were small things like the variety of food on the dinner table. Other times, it was big things like parents divorcing or moving out from under my parents' roof. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to paint a bleak picture at all; I just am keenly aware of the rhythm of change in my life. It's funny: when I...
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” —Matthew 3:2 To repent is to change your mind, to change the way you think. Anything that we do or say, anything that we allow to set itself up against God, we are called to repent of. We are called to repent of anything that refuses to give God dominion. I was reading the Psalms today and the writer was pleading with God to bring retribution to the wicked. The wicked in this passage were...
I was reading through some of my journal entries from a year ago, and I swear I don't believe I actually wrote them. The maturity I expressed in my writings a year ago far outshines the musings of my heart now (or so I feel). Literally, I am in awe of who I've been. I remember every situation, I remember all the pain. Yet somehow through it all, the yearning of my heart remains the same: the abundant life. I am a citizen of heaven. I was made...
I’m struggling with what to say right now. I want to feel like I did when I took this picture. I felt free and safe. I felt hope. I felt fear. Now I just feel very tired. I’ve applied for five different jobs this week, now I’m in the process of following up. Who knows: maybe God will open doors somewhere. I’ll just keep trying, and in the meantime, I’ll keep drawing as close to Abba as I possibly can. I won’t let go until You bless...
All of my life has been waiting for this culmination. Yet somehow I'm still stuck in between. It's like everything about where I've been is about to give way into everything about where I will be and the catalyst is who I am now. I have been learning so much over the last few weeks about trusting God, and He's been speaking to me a lot about things with cumulative value—things that are worth very little by themselves but compound into things...
