Posted by: Abby
Sometimes it's hard to be content amongst all the hubbub that goes on around us. After all, sometimes when it rains it pours, but then, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Okay, so that being said, I've personally been going through a tough time in my own life. Things just aren't going the way I expected or wanted them to right now. First, our house flooded. The entire basement accumulated two inches while we were at church. Now, before this I would have been like, "Well, it's not that big of a deal, I guess, if someone gets their basement flooded. It can't be that much trouble." Yeah, well I would have been wrong. A flooded basement entails things like: moving pretty much all furniture upstairs, tearing out carpet, shop-vaccing water, and living in close and cluttered quarters with the rest of your family for a few weeks. Now, I'm not trying to incite you pity with this, I'm just telling you what's been happening. Needless to say, it's been a learning experience. Thins like this can cause stress. But on top of this, I myself am dealing with a situation that I never thought I'd have to. I won't go into details, but it's been another big learning experience for me, and it entails an amount of confrontation, which I'm struggling with. So that said, these last few weeks have been hard. At first, I sort of ignored all my stress and hid it away. In fact, I hid it away so well that I didn't even know I had any until one night when everything came together and I had a release. I thought some things through about my circumstances and I realized some things. "Joshua 1:9- Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid nor dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." I understand that as human beings and sinful creatures, we get stressed and worried about things, even if we don't realize it at first, but I think a big problem is that after we realize we're stressed and hand it over to God, we actually still hang onto it. I mean, how many times have you been worried about something, or there was something bugging you and you decided that you should probably give it over to God, only to find that after you prayed, it still wouldn't leave you alone and was dragging you lower and lower. I know I've done that. The Bible is full of verses that tell us that in God, we can have peace. We just need to really let go of our troubles and hand them over to Him. God promises us that He'll give us peace, all we have to do is accept it. I encourage you today to not only hand over your doubts, worries, and troubles to God, but to ask him to give you the strength to be free of them and to truly give them up. All things are possible with God.
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Posted by: Anna Don't know about you, but I'm generally doing good if I can make myself genuinely forgive someone that I'm mad at. And personally, when I do manage to, I think I've done my duty and all that's left is for me to not allow myself back into the grudge or into giving them the silent treatment, etc. The other day though, as I was reading Isaiah, it hit me. There's a step 2 to forgiveness. Only a couple weeks before, I'd read 2 Corinthians 2:5-7 "So if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure--not to put it too severely--to all of you. For such a one, this punishment by majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him." I kind of just glossed over it. Like "Okay, cool- forgive the sinner, don't be too harsh on him, got it." It kind of seemed more applicable to a church situation, where someone in a church family caused the problem, then the rest of the congregation is to forgive and comfort them. I didn't really register it as meaning much more. Now to what I read in Isaiah. "Comfort, comfort My people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins." Isaiah 40:1-2 I'm sure you've all read enough of Isaiah to know that a lot of it talks about how God's people have messed up and were continuing to do so. . . and that a decent portion of it is also about how He chooses to forgive them, and loves them anyway. First I'd just like to point out: what a beautiful picture that is. I've been going through the entire book of Isaiah over the last few weeks, I'm nearing the end now, and seeing God's redemption and unending love despite Israel's sin and wandering is pretty awesome. But this verse really struck me. Comfort, comfort My people, God says. Speak tenderly to them. Does that sound like He begrudgingly forgave them to you? Like a "Allll-riiight, if I have to. . . I forgive you. Now get it right next time." Uh, no. That's not the message I'm getting here. Instead, what I see is God willing to look completely past Jerusalem's sin and betrayal, to forgive them freely, to the point that His first thought it to comfort them. To reassure them, make sure they know He still loves them. Is that how we forgive? Here's a general break-down of my forgiveness process: Someone ticks me off. I might not snap or yell back at them, or any such revenge, but I huff and puff in my bedroom and stew over it for a while, sometimes a long while if I'm really upset. Gradually I mutter to myself that I promised to try and be more forgiving and loving, so I should probably get over it. So I take a deep breath. "Fine. I forgive them." Then I waltz out of my room, and don't allow myself to be curt or silent to them, but instead pretend nothing happened. So. . . does that match up with God wanting to comfort and encourage us? With His concern being whether or not we recover from our own mistake? Nope, I'm afraid it doesn't. I'm not necessarily saying that when you forgive someone, you need to fawn over them and gush out reassurances that you still love them and it's all in the past. Personally, I could never manage something that emotional and dramatic. But I think we far too often take forgiveness only to the very first level- that we get back onto civil terms with our offender, and mentally check them off on our list of forgiven people. Deep down, we may still be angry, or still wanting to 'give them a piece of our mind', that sort of thing. I can't claim to be better than anyone else about that. I may not instigate or continue direct conflict with someone, but I can sure spend an hour in my room throwing a teenage temper-tantrum and/or a pity party, or just fuming about the person I'm mad at. Yet is that how God treats us? We totally deserve it. We sin against God far more often than other people sin against us. God has every right to give us the silent treatment, or to not forgive us at all. How amazing, then, that He chose to die for us on a cross, because He loves us so much that He wants to and does forgive us. How amazing that even when we mess up, His desire is to have us return to Him, to know that He still loves us. Perhaps we should remember our own faults, and focus a bit more on how we can love others rather than how we can show our displeasure to them. I don't think any of us can ever get nearly as loving and forgiving as we should be, so I think it needs to be a constant effort. After all, God is definitely constantly forgiving and loving us, isn't He? "The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong." -Mahatma Grandhi |
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