Skip to main content

Just sayin...

When I felt my feet slipping, you came with your love and kept me steady. And when I was burdened with worries, you comforted me and made me feel secure. (Psalm 94:18-19)

On ice, the small steps you have to take to avoid having your feet go out from under you, or the slower speeds you must drive in order to avoid a spin-out are "precautionary measures" you PERSONALLY take to keep yourself from loss or injury. There are clearly times when all you can do personally is just not enough to keep you upright and on course, though. Your reliance upon another to be there to catch you when you begin to slip, or the street sanding being ever vigilant is something outside of yourself you are hoping will keep you in a position of safety. We use both internal and external sources to aid in keeping us safe. What we may fail to recognize is the two most important "internal and external" sources of safety at our disposal - the presence and power of God. God expects us to have a certain amount of "precautionary measures" in place in our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual lives, but when our defenses are less than ideal in any of these areas, he is at the ready to keep us from harm.

Have you ever noticed that you don't just "slip" - you somehow "know" you are slipping, but you may not be cognizant of the fact you need to catch yourself before you do! God's ability to keep us steady when we begin to feel our "standing" slipping away is unparalleled. What is it God uses to "steady us" in our walk? Nothing less than his love! If we can just get a picture of this, we may face our "slips" a little differently - perhaps not as though they were the biggest blundering we could have done us having to find some way to "get back up" all on our own. It is his love which comes to our rescue - his unconditional, "I will ALWAYS love you", never late love. God comes with his love - it is this love which keeps us steady. Most of us long for love of this kind while we are here on this earth but forget how much we already have this love! We just need to be embraced fully by it and then rest secure in it.

Being burdened with something we weren't meant to carry on our own is one of the places we can 'slip' very easily. The issue is not that we "can" carry these things, but that we weren't designed to carry them "alone". I "can" carry heavy bags of cement - but I am no longer going to do it. Why? I value my knees and my back! I will ask for help if there is a project involving me needing cement to be mixed around my home. I "can" carry lots and lots of stress, with multiple challenging issues pressing in around me - but I choose to share the load with others. Why? I value my sanity! What we value will begin to get our attention. If we come to value the "load bearing shift" God asks of us, we will begin to give this some attention in our lives. God helps us deal with the difference between "I can" and "I choose" when it comes to the burdens of worries in our lives. We "can" determine to bear up under their load. We "choose" to allow him to carry them on our behalf. 

We might not want to let go at first, but he helps us recognize the "efficiency" of allowing the one who knows the end from the beginning to bear the load which will ultimately trip us up if we choose to say, "I can do this on my own". You are not in this alone, for all of us have to come to the place of laying down our "I can" and picking up our "I choose" moments. Even those "I choose" moments are made possible because God comes to us with his comfort and his ability to soothe our feelings of guilt we might encounter by not carrying these burdens all by ourselves. Everything we need to let go is at our disposal - all it takes is us opening up our hands and releasing what we have been holding onto in our frustration, pride, and fear! Most of us need more of God's comfort and care than we openly choose to admit, but when we finally take the first step of admitting this to ourselves, heaven's gates are opened on our behalf. This is where God can connect his resources with our need - his love with our slips, his comfort with our burdens, and his treasured peace with our "feelings" of guilt, anxiety, and fear. Just sayin!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What did obedience cost Mary and Joseph?

As we have looked at the birth of Christ, we have considered the fact he was born of a virgin, with an earthly father so willing to honor God with his life that he married a woman who was already pregnant.  In that day and time, a very taboo thing.  We also saw how the mother of Christ was chosen by God and given the dramatic news that she would carry the Son of God.  Imagine her awe, but also see her tremendous amount of fear as she would have received this announcement, knowing all she knew about the time in which she lived about how a woman out of wedlock showing up pregnant would be treated.  We also explored the lowly birth of Jesus in a stable of sorts, surrounded by animals, visited by shepherds, and then honored by magi from afar.  The announcement of his birth was by angels - start to finish.  Mary heard from an angel (a messenger from God), while Joseph was set at ease by a messenger from God on another occasion - assuring him the thing he was about to do in marrying Mary wa

A brilliant display indeed

Love from the center of who you are ; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply ; practice playing second fiddle. Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. (Romans 12:9-12) Integrity and Intensity don't seem to fit together all that well, but they are uniquely interwoven traits which actually complement each other. "Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it." God asks for us to have some intensity (fervor) in how we love (from the center of who we are), but he also expects us to have integrity in our love as he asks us to be real in our love (don't fake it). They are indeed integral to each other. At first, we may only think of integrity as honesty - some adherence to a moral code within. I believe there is a little more to integrity than meets the eye. In the most literal sense,

Do me a favor

If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care—then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends. Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. (Philippians 2:1-4) Has God's love made ANY difference in your life? What is that difference? Most of us will likely say that our lives were changed for the good, while others will say there was a dramatic change. Some left behind lifestyles marked by all manner of outward sin - like drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, or even thievery. There are many that will admit the things they left behind were just a bit subtler - what we can call inward sin - things like jealousy,