Category: Faith

Faith, Life, Self-Improvement

2020 -My Hopes, Dreams, and Goals

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Don’t you love the feeling of a new year? Now, don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Christmas! I love the shopping, and baking, and decorations, and chaos that comes with Christmas. But once it’s all over, I love the new year.

The fresh start feeling. The clean feeling when you pack up all the Christmas decorations. (Mine are currently still up, including a Christmas tree that only has working lights on the bottom half of the tree!) Everything feels fresh and new. Not only the environment, but also my attitude and my motivation.

Don’t get me wrong, I often get WAY too ambitious in the new year resolve to do way too many things, as I addressed in last year’s new year post.

Last year, I said I just wanted to look back and be able to say I am a better person now than I was at the beginning of the year. As I look back, I can’t say for certain whether or not I achieved that goal. I had a lot of new and better experiences, for sure. I even developed better habits this year! Like fixing the bed every day and never sleeping in my makeup! But am I a better person? Do I love more? Am I more patient and considerate? Do I exhibit the fruit of the Spirit?

I don’t know.

But I do know what I want to strive for in 2020. I want to be known as a follower of Christ. I want people to be able to look at my life and see Him. I want to show love and compassion, patience, and goodness. I want to produce spiritual fruit. I want others to be energized and uplifted by being around me. My husband, my family, my friends, and my co-workers.

I want to be a better person, and I will do that by trying to be more like Jesus. In 2020, I want to be more intentional in my pursuit of Christ. To intentionally make time to spend reading His Word and praying.

Of course, I have goals to eat better, and save money. We have a lot of house projects on our 2020 to-do list. And I am really wanting to become more organized. However, out of all of these things, I hope and pray that this year my focus will not be on me. But that it will be on Christ and how I can be more like Him. And when I do that, I know all the other things will fall into place.

I hope you have a wonderful New Year. I would love to hear what goals you have for 2020!

Faith

“I Love Her”

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It was one of those days. It had been one of those weeks. It was my third 12 hour shift in a row. I had one hour to go. I was done. I just wanted to go home. After three days of constant business, half staff, and an insane amount of case loads, I was ready to check out and start my two week vacation. I looked at the clock. 10:30. Only one more hour. So close to freedom, I thought I was in the clear without having to do another super crazy case.

I was wrong. We got the call for an emergency surgery. I started setting up for it. Just as I got the room prepared, we got another call. Scratch that, a more urgent emergency was coming in. Change of plans. I start doing the necessary preparations to change procedures.

Then we found out why this particular patient was coming in. She had done something horrific. Terrible. Indescribable. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. But now she needed medical help.

My attitude changed immediately. My mind running wild with thoughts I’ve never had about any patient before. I didn’t want to help her. I didn’t want to bust my exhausted butt trying to save her. She deserved what she had coming to her. I couldn’t speak to her because I was afraid of what I would say. I looked at her with contempt.

It should have been a simple surgery to fix the problem. But of course, this time there were complications. I was annoyed. The room was high stress. I was running here and there, getting things that the doctors needed. I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to be clocking out, not running around, working hard to save this person that I had no respect for.

When things calmed down a bit, I was just looking at her on the operating table. I was glaring at her with contempt. How could this person do such a thing and then come to the hospital and expect me to do absolutely everything to help her?

And then God spoke to me, “I love her.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a message from God so clearly in my life before. There, in the middle of that chaotic OR, I was so completely convicted of all of the things I had just been thinking of her. Here I had been judging her and thinking terrible thoughts about how I didn’t want to help her, and how I thought she didn’t deserve it. I was thinking those things about someone that God loves. Someone He died for! He loves her as much as he loves me!

I was blown away and I just wanted to cry. And cry I did. This profound realization of the overwhelming, unconditional love of God just blew my mind. Sometimes I wish I could tell you what she did. Just so you could understand my feelings, but it doesn’t matter what she did. Her sin that I thought was so disgusting and vile and terrible. It was the same as my sins. To God, our sins are equal. And his love for us is equal.

I was so blown away by God’s grace. I went home and cried to my husband. I don’t think I slept at all. I thought about it the minute I woke up. I cried to my mom and sister the next day. How amazing is His Grace. How profound is His Love.

That moment in the OR that I thought was just another annoyingly busy night has changed me. I will remember that moment forever. And I hope I never forget the magnitude of God’s love.

Faith

Daily Consecration

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A few weeks ago we had a guest speaker at church. He spoke out of Joshua 3:5

“Then Joshua told the people, ‘Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you. “

Now, this is nothing I haven’t heard before. Growing up in church, I know that you’re supposed to consecrate yourself to the Lord. I know you’re supposed to “take up your cross” daily, and “offer your body as a living sacrifice.” I know all this, and yet it was one of those sermons that just made it seem like I was really understanding it for the first time, or at least the first time in a long time.

I’m not going to try to preach to you the same wonderful sermon I heard. Pastor Bruce did an amazing job of that already. You can listen to the full sermon here.

After listening to that sermon I knew that I haven’t been giving myself to the Lord everyday. But I wanted to. So I started being intentional about it. But I wanted to do something realistic and also meaningful. For example, in the past I’ve made it a goal to read my Bible every single day for a year. So for many months I read everyday out of obligation. I knew that some of those days I did not retain one word of what I was reading. And then eventually, I had a super busy day and I forgot to read! So then I started to read less and less because “what’s the point if I’m not going to retain it anyway? I’ve already failed my goal.”

So I decided I can manage 5 minutes a day. I can. I take 5 minutes and intentionally pray. And I take that time to consecrate my day to God. Some days I just sit at the kitchen table and spend those five minutes to completely focused on God and my prayer to him. Other days, I do it while I’m making my breakfast or fixing my bed. And you know what? Some days I forget. And that’s okay!

I have found a few things that work best for me and I encourage you to try different things and find what is best for you. For me, praying out loud is soooooo helpful. It keeps my mind from wandering and helps me realize what’s actually on my heart. Also, it is usually best for me to do it either while I am still in bed I  the morning and haven’t become distracted by other things, or during breakfast when I just sit alone and have a cup of coffee with God.

I can honestly say, the days that I intentionally consecrate myself and my day to God are SO much better than the days I don’t. If I find myself struggling with a particular choice during the day, it is so much easier to make the right choice after I’ve dedicated myself to Him. And the days that I mess up the worst are usually the days I didn’t spend one on one time with Him. Not always, but usually.

Do you consecrate yourself daily? If love to hear what works for you. If you don’t, then I hope you try it. Trust me, it’s a life changer.

Faith, Self-Improvement

Taking Thanksgiving For Granted

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It’s the night before Thanksgiving. I’m going to confess something. I’ve never really liked Thanksgiving all that much. I’ve never told many people that because I feel like a completely terrible person. The one holiday that’s supposed to be about giving thanks and being grateful for what we have. I mean, if you know me, you know that I LOVE food. Yet, somehow I am usually not very impressed with Thanksgiving food. It’s just not my first choice. I’ve always just kind of liked to think of Thanksgiving as a part of the Christmas festivities! Now Christmas. That’s where it’s at! Am I right?

Anyway, I go along with Thanksgiving and it’s always nice enough, but do you know what part I dread the most? I am literally so ashamed to tell you. You know the part where we go around the table and tell everyone what we are most thankful for? That’s it. That’s the moment. I hate it when it comes to me and I have to think of an answer. It’s not that I don’t have a lot to be thankful for, it’s that every answer I come up with sounds so generic. Like I’m reciting a memorized answer for a quiz. Family? So generic! Are you just sucking up to all the relatives sitting around the table? A good career? Well honestly, work has been pretty rough lately and it’s the reason I’m not with my family or my boyfriend this holiday, so I don’t know that I can 100% truthfully say I’m thankful for my job. Friends? So cliche! Plus, I don’t act like I’m very thankful for them, since I hardly ever call them. Anyway, you get my point. Anytime I try to answer this question I feel like every answer comes across as generic and cliche and insincere. So I hate it.  I don’t want my answer to sound so boring and superficial.

But today I’ve been thinking. I’ve been trying to think about it with a different perspective. Today I realized that I should be thankful that I have so many different options to answer that question with. And I realized why all of those answers sound generic and insincere to me. Because I take them for granted! I take my large, loving family for granted. I take my warm, cozy house for granted. I take my amazing friends for granted. I take the ginormous feast of turkey and stuffing that I somehow always get, even the years that I’m working at the hospital on Thanksgiving for granted. For some reason I always felt like I needed some mind-blowing thing to be thankful for. Like “I’m thankful I was miraculously cured from cancer”. When in reality, I should be so thankful that I’ve never had to hope for a miraculous cure because, thankfully, I’ve never had cancer!

This Thanksgiving I want to stop taking all of the blessings in my everyday life for granted and start being genuinely thankful for them. I hope you do the same. Happy Thanksgiving!

Faith, Self-Improvement

The Story Behind the Struggle

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Struggle. Not exactly a comforting word. It certainly doesn’t sound like a splendid experience. I’m fact, the word is quite anxiety inducing. Even Merriam-Webster defines it negatively.

struggle
verb strug·gle \ ˈstrə-gəl \struggled; struggling

intransitive verb
1 :to make strenuous or violent efforts in the face of difficulties or opposition struggling with the problem

2 :to proceed with difficulty or with great effort

Strenuous. Violent. Difficult. Opposition. Great effort. It sounds hard. It sounds exhausting. In fact, it is exhausting. We all know it. We all have those days. We all have our different struggles and challenges.

Back in high school my struggles were simpler. Or, at least they seem simpler as I look back now. But at the time they seemed so hard. They were worries like “Will anyone ask me to the dance?” And ” Will I be able to keep up my A in Biology? ” As I grew to be a college student my struggles seemed to grow with me. “How will I ever be able to pay for a college degree?” “It’s so hard to balance two jobs while going to school!”

Now that I’m past those particular struggles I can look back and think about how silly it seems that those times were actually really hard for me. I remember having breakdowns and getting stressed out about those things just the same way I have breakdowns today. Today my struggles are more like “I watched someone die today and I couldn’t do anything .” Or ” I hope somehow I’ll figure out how to pay my mortgage, bills, and take care of this entire house all by myself. ”

Back when I was in high school I found a verse in the Bible that completely motivated me to keep on going. It was Colossians 1:29. It was my favorite verse because no matter what I was going through it would comfort me and remind me that was my job in life. I remember memorizing it and repeating it whenever I was feeling worn down. I still have it memorized today, in the original NIV version, as that is what version I used back then.

Yet to this end I labor, struggling with all His energy, which so powerfully works in me. 

When I first thought about that verse I imagined a different type of struggle. Not an oppressive one, but a beautiful one. I imagined God’s powerful energy racing and struggling inside myself. Thinking about that struggle instead of my worldly life struggles gave me confidence that no matter what I was going through, I could overcome it because of His energy and power.

It wasn’t until many years after I came to rely on this verse so much that I realized that this last verse of the chapter is actually summing up the entire chapter that answers the “why” question. While I think the entire chapter is amazing -seriously, go read it- I think verses 28-29 really explain our purpose of struggling and labor in this life.

Colossians 1:28-29New Living Translation (NLT)

28 So we tell others about Christ, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all the wisdom God has given us. We want to present them to God, perfect[a] in their relationship to Christ.29 That’s why I work and struggle so hard, depending on Christ’s mighty power that works within me.

God’s energy struggles within us and we work so hard so that we can teach everyone about Jesus and present them perfect to Him. It’s such an encouragement to know that not only are we working towards an amazingly worthy goal, but that we don’t have to do it alone. We get to do it with the help of the power of Christ inside of us. That’s what makes it splendid.

So no matter what you’re struggling through, I hope these verses bring you comfort and encouragement. I hope you’ll join me in this big, splendid struggle called life.