Month: March 2015

Strengths are Weaknesses?

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Have you ever heard the phrase, “Your strengths are also your weaknesses?” or “When you are given a gift you are responsible to use the gift and not hide it from others?” I have heard those two sayings my entire life.

The first statement encompasses knowing yourself and using balance in your life. The second statement also include self-knowledge but also acknowledges the fact that our creator is a gracious giving God and empowers us with gifts to tend, to grow, to train, to become – a challenge not to just sit by and coast through life but to keep our eyes and ears open for the next thing He wants to teach us.

Have you ever heard the statement that there are “seasons of life” it comes from Ecclesiastes which is a book in the Bible and was written by the wisest man on earth, King Solomon. People came from miles around to ask him for advice, he had it all, wealth, power and the smarts to go along with it. In this book though he came to the conclusion that nothing is new under the sun, that all through his life he had tried this and that and came to the end realizing that it is God that gives and takes away as He sees fit.

Jesus rested, Jesus came away to listen to God the Father and to give His disciples a break from all of the crowds. Then He was rejuvenated and walked on water one time, another time he cast out demons from a man living in a cemetery, another time he calmed a storm on the sea all after his power naps and talk time with his Father. He was and is the perfect shepherd, the perfect model of a balanced, holy life. A human life living ‘full on’ for God in a human body, yet he allowed himself to be brutalized and killed in the most painful way… He is the model for selfless living, for boundaries to those who would try to control him or keep him from accomplishing His mission. He modeled dependence and obedience to God the Father, listening and obeying yet being authentic when things got tough. His mission was accomplished in only three power packed years.

So then I ask myself, how do I live the Christ like life in my longer life span without burning out. Sabbaths day rest. Simple but to the point. Simple but everything in my sphere of influence shouts out my name “come and help me” silencing the tyranny of the urgent to say yes to the BEST choices in my life has been and continues to be my life time place of learning and growing. As each year passes I learn that God is truly my sufficiency and when I remain in Him amazing things happen in my life and in the lives of those that I dearly love.
Journal Entry March 29, 2015

Writing as Prayer and Worship

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Writing is like breathing for me, I must exhale the thoughts that ramble in my head and inhale the ideas, thoughts and vision the Lord sends my way via various sources. I must share what I write, if with no one else or nothing else than the ink and paper or computer doc. that I’m using now. The multitude of feelings, thoughts and expressions of what God is doing in my life must immerge or I would be undone.

I cannot really claim anything that I have done in my own strength has changed myself, crying out night after night, year after year, writing in a journal for decades, reading scripture to survive…all those things were a prelude to developing the listening ear that hears, writes and meets with God face to face. I see his people in my mind’s eye, He shares some of His thoughts with me and I write. Sometimes He says to me, “Stacey, just write,” and I obey. I’ve even gone to using the sticky note application on my SmartPhone when ideas and thoughts or pictures and visions come to my mind throughout the day.

As I’ve said before, writing has become as important to me as breathing; it is prayer, my way to communicate with my Father in Heaven. He speaks to me and I return the favor. It has become the conduit of love from me to God and from God to me. When I write all the things that I have not been able to form into speech, instead form into fluent thoughts that immerge as a shining beacon beckoning me homeward.

I write to talk to God, to expose my heart to Him sharing all my hurts, shame, fears, frustrations, and pain. All that is known or revealed to me is dumped through ink and paper back into His hands. All His love, joy, peace and patience are refilled like an ink pen is filled with ink by being dipped into the ink well. I am the ink the Lord is the pen and the ink well source. He replenishes me each day as I ask Him to cleanse and make me new. I pour out myself onto the pages the ink becoming words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs organizing my life into the patterns of a story with beginning, middle and end. The beginning has been written and the end I know, it is the middle with which I write to become.

Writing is like listening to a beautiful piece of intricately composed music, the melody enters then the harmony followed by the percussion and bass, rich sounds, full sounds, sheer pleasure. Writing has become like music for me, a form of worship for my Lord, the King and the lover of my soul. I write for Him, I write for us, I write to share parts of my being that the words I speak could never utter so eloquently nor so boldly.

In my solitude and separation during the past five months of a debilitation disease in which the only non-pain filled motion was that of typing on my computer, my God orchestrated sabbatical, I found a peace that I had not thought possible. I have found a steadfast love that enfolds and encompasses me as well as brings me face to face with who I am in God. I am His, fully loved, cherished and complete through Christ’s blood shed on the cross. As a child I was told that if I was the only person on the earth, Christ would have come to earth, suffered, died and risen again just for me. In my place of healing, right now, where I am, at this moment, I embrace that love, soak it up and cheer loudly – YEAH GOD!!!

I began writing long ago to record my thoughts about daily life, now I write to record daily life as I think about God and as God thinks about me.
August 28, 2012