4 WriteStuff

God brought lunch on our walk today… a lot to chew on.

First, I had a lot of talking to do, I prayed, I praised, I pleaded…
the nice thing about a long prayer walk is that I can’t talk the whole time… so God actually gets a few words in edgewise… and by edgewise, I mean a double edged sword that cuts to the chase.

God reminded me that we should NOT be surprised if we speak the truth and the response is animosity… a lie HATES truth! It will fight back kicking and screaming because the very life of the lie relies on the truth not being heard.

God has already ordained my boundaries… my dream, my goal is to create a path around our property boundary and utilize the full potential here for a couple different purposes… pending preparation and funds.

This morning I began my first walk with the loppers… I knew this would be an enormous undertaking,.. my plan is to keep whittling away. As I circumvented a couple major brush areas, the visual is that God has already ordained my boundaries, but I do not yet have the potential to reach them… they are there, I can even see most of them, but I need to prune and clear a lot of dead wood and thick brush to reach them. Picture this: 3 miles of brush and down tree clearing… a bit less if I utilize the adjacent power line road. I can give up at the enormity of the task, or I can keep whittling away. I realized that sometimes we have to take a path around obstacles until we are able to focus on them and remove them. I wonder how much of my path, my journey has avoided obstacles that I now need to go back and clear? I realize that I need to start and just keep plugging away. The joy of the journey is the moment, it is the progress, it is not necessarily the finish.

Choose your battles… you can’t do it all unless you let something else go. Sometimes there was a good path around the obstacles and it made sense to focus on the places which were impassable and save the other stuff for another day. Some days we have the energy for the big battles, some days, we need to pick at little branches and rocks.

Focus, focus, focus or we WILL fall flat on our face.

The hard thing is the “LOVE ANYWAY” that God was impressing on my heart. Some people are hard to love – reminds me of a cat, “when I want it, I want your undivided attention NOW, when I don’t want it, I’ll scratch your eyes out before I’ll let you close! ”

When we throw our trash in someone’s yard, that’s a problem – OUR problem and it reveals a huge obstacle – disrespect. We don’t get to be judge and jury… we don’t get to decide someone is worthy/unworthy of love and/or respect. Jesus loved them enough to die for them, can we not love and respect those who Jesus loves and respects?

“do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” means just that… how would you feel if someone said/treated you the way you just treated them? God’s not dead… you don’t get to play God.

We don’t get to choose what someone else needs to work on as far as their path and what obstacles they need to clear, we can only work on our own stuff. They are free to make their own choices and we will support those we love in their choices. We don’t get to control and manipulate others just because they make a choice we disagree with.

The biggest is our marriages – they are huge bullseyes because they are the very foundation of the family, and when a marriage collapses, the whole family suffers. We MUST, must, must pray for our marriage and pray for our spouse… husbands to LOVE their wives unconditionally and to respect them; wives to RESPECT their husbands unconditionally, and to love them…
When we start throwing out conditions, we are playing judge again… you are good enough to receive my love/respect if/when you do this… whatever they do, it will honestly NEVER be enough!

God IS NOT DEAD! Let God be God, Don’t stand between your spouse and the Holy Spirit working, love like Jesus…

Yikes! I was praying for an easy lesson today, God! Those “Paul moments” are brutal!