Thursday, December 5, 2013

God tends to our desires before we know them!

After reading God's covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17 and with King David in I Chronicles 17, God promises to care for our needs and desires before we even know them and before they even happen!

This is SO hopeful, because often I don't even know what I want or need... but God does, and He will help me understand myself and these things. Its nice to know that I am being taken care of, even when I don't know how to truly help myself.

Later in the morning, I came across a C.S. Lewis passage that confirmed these things in different words, while also answering any potential questions regarding pre-destination. I still need to confirm these things as truth in my heart, but I love how God cares for Abraham and David in the Old Testament.

C.S. Lewis says:
"When we are praying about the result, say, of a battle or a medical consultation the thought will often cross our minds that (if only we knew it) the event is already decided one way or the other. I believe this to be no good reason for ceasing our prayers. The event certainly has been decided—in a sense it was decided ‘before all worlds’. But one of the things taken into account in deciding it, and therefore one of the things that really cause it to happen, may be this very prayer that we are now offering. Thus, shocking as it may sound, I conclude that we can at noon become part causes of an event occurring at ten a.m. (Some scientists would find this easier than popular thought does.) The imagination will, no doubt, try to play all sorts of tricks on us at this point. It will ask, ‘Then if I stop praying can God go back and alter what has already happened?’ No. The event has already happened and one of its causes has been the fact that you are asking such questions instead of praying. It will ask, ‘Then if I begin to pray can God go back and alter what has already happened?’ No. The event has already happened and one of its causes is your present prayer. Thus something does really depend on my choice. My free act contributes to the cosmic shape. That contribution is made in eternity or ‘before all worlds’; but my consciousness of contributing reaches me at a particular point in the time-series."
-Miracles

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Senior Year-ness

I beg. I fight. I hold my breath. I can't breathe. Oh, thats right. Breathe out. I wonder. I doubt. I remember this life is not about me, but about how much I receive God's love and how much of that love I give to others in the many ways I think, breathe, speak, listen, and move while spending my days here on earth.
I will die someday.
So I might as well stop worrying about the perfect spot where all MY gifts and MY talents and MY passions can effectively fit into this world. After all... if I am entitled to every happiness and all my rights are worth worrying about, will all that time and attention on myself help uplift others and enlarge my sensitivity of NEEDING God to fill me with the love to serve others?
I will die someday. I've been told dying to myself now can help me truly live, and live abundantly.
May I surrender my will to be stretch, molded, pried, renewed, and fired like a glass jar to hold this precious love and pour it out over others. I hope to show others that there is a God, and he is love and he is faithful to love, even when we fall short.