In Need of a Blessing?

Where does this Friday morning find you? Worn out? Stressed? Happy? For some, it's been an incredibly hard week, for others perhaps, it's been one of joy and blessing. Wherever you are, I believe this will speak to your heart. It's a prayer of surrender and truly one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. May it bless you this day, sweet friends.

Greetings and Another Gem by Jon Walker

Happy Friday! How I miss you! Be assured that even though life is keeping me from blogging much these days, know that so many of you pass through my thoughts (and subsequently my prayers) on a daily basis. You are loved, sweet friends. Loved indeed.

I received this message earlier today from GraceCreates, a daily devotional message written by one of my favorites, Jon Walker. Like so many others, this one is simply too good to keep to myself. See if this doesn't just give you an added measure of strength today.

Have a wonderful weekend!


God Sees Who?

The Lord turned to [Gideon] and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?” Judges 6:14 (NIV)
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Gideon was the least member of the weakest clan in the tribe of Manasseh.

His task on the day in question was the tedious threshing of wheat, a process where the cereal grain is knocked loose from the chaff.

But this devotional is not about agriculture. It’s about God’s ability to see you for who you are meant to be not for what you appear to be. God saw Gideon as a mighty warrior and judge who would lead the Israelites back to their proper worship of God (Judges 6:12).

Gideon, on the other hand, saw himself as just a guy cranking wheat through a creaky old winepress.

But that didn’t matter to God. He told Gideon: “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?” (Judges 6:14 NIV).

(Note to servants of God: The strength of the Sender is more important than the strength, or perceived weakness, of the one being sent.)

Gideon was still stuck in tunnel vision, believing what he thought and what he saw was the truth. To paraphrase the ancient Hebrew, Gideon told God, “I just don’t have what it takes, Lord. I know you’re perfect, but I think you made a mistake” (Judges 6:15 NIV).

Again, paraphrasing the ancient Hebrew, God says to Gideon, “Get your head out of the wheat dust and pay attention to me. I will be with you and so, yes, you will strike down all the Midianites as if they are no more than one man” (Judges 6:16).

It doesn’t matter what Gideon says about himself or what others say about Gideon. Only one opinion counts: God’s.

What God says about Gideon is the truth.

What God says about you is the truth. You are a precious child, created in his image; a sweet aroma that is pleasing to the Lord.


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from Streams in the Desert

(photo courtesy of Google images)

He made me into a polished arrow. (Isaiah 49:2)

Pebble Beach, on the California coast, has become quite famous for the beautiful pebbles found there. The raging white surf continually roars, thundering and pounding against the rocks on the shore. These stones are trapped in the arms of the merciless waves. They are tossed, rolled, rubbed together, and ground against the sharp edges of the cliffs. Both day and night, this process of grinding continues relentlessly. And what is the result?

Tourists from around the world flock there to collect the beautiful round stones. They display them in cabinets and use them to decorate their homes. Yet a little farther up the coast, just around the point of the cliff, is a quiet cove. Protected from the face of the ocean, sheltered from the storms, and always in the sun, the sands are covered with an abundance of pebbles never sought by the travelers.

So why have these stones been left untouched through all the years? Simply because they have escaped all the turmoil and the grinding of the waves. The quietness and peace have left them as they have always been -- rough, unpolished, and devoid of beauty -- for polish is the result of difficulties.

Since God knows what a niche we are to fill, let us trust Him to shape us to it. And since He knows what work we are to do, let us trust Him to grind us so we will be properly prepared.

O blows that strike! O hurts that pierce

This fainting heart of mine!
What are you but the Master's tools
Forming a work Divine?

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Friends, wherever God has us right now, let us fully surrender our hearts to the task. May we allow Him to do his best refining work through our greatest struggles and difficulties. I'm praying for you. Be blessed this day.

2009 Scripture Memory Challenge #9 and How it Relates to My Weight Loss Journey

And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. ~Colossians 1:10-12

God had been working on me for awhile. I’m ashamed to admit I tried to ignore His loving persistence. I can’t even tell you exactly how long this battle of heart wore on, but early one morning last fall, He finally got through to me and I surrendered. A day or two later, I received word that a Weight Watchers At Work group was starting in my office and they were seeking participants. I had to chuckle at God’s apparent swift work. He clearly didn’t want me to have time to change my mind (He knows me too well). I immediately signed up and later that week, attended my first meeting. I had done Weight Watchers one other time 7 years prior and had lost some, but I knew this time was different because my motivation had changed. This time, it was about being more pleasing to God and taking better care of the body He had given me.

During a difficult season early in my marriage, I began turning to food for comfort (unknowingly at first). Though I became a Christian at the age of 13, after high school I began drifting away from the Lord and soon there was little evidence of His presence in my life. I met and married Tom during this time. He was unsaved. Thanks be to God, eleven years into our marriage, Tom became a Christian and I returned to the Lord. As you can imagine, God worked within our family in amazing ways and our lives radically changed.

Years went by and though I believed I had given God full access to my heart, my previous coping patterns with food continued. Though I would typically cook relatively healthy meals for my family, my personal eating habits were horrible. I would buy pop-tarts, snack cakes and bags of mini candy bars and keep them hidden at work and at home. Even though most days I would eat a decent lunch and dinner, I would snack constantly on sweets. If I went to the grocery on my way home from work, I'd buy a candy bar (or two) in the checkout line and eat them immediately.

It wasn't always sweets...sometimes I'd stop at a local drive through for a cheeseburger and fries. I'd eat them in the parking lot, throw away the bag then go home to prepare dinner that I would also eat. Strange as it sounds, for the longest time, I didn't even see the irony of that. Once God began to open my eyes to what I was doing, I felt shame, which in some ways only made matters worse. I then shifted into denial mode which for a time, seemed to be working -- that is, until I began outgrowing all my clothes.

Over time, God began to wear away my defensiveness. Through scores of verses, through music and other believers, He showed me that only He was able to fulfill the needs I was trying to fill with food...but I had to let Him. Most importantly, he assured me of His love. Last September, I finally "put down my dukes" and laid aside the temporal comforts for His. Has it always been easy? No. It required accountability and sometimes moment by moment prayer. But God's strength and presence has been so evident. Often His spirit would speak love and encouragement during my exercise or a particularly hard day. Seeing the number on the scale go down, and knowing my food choices were healthy and pleasing to God brought much joy along the journey as well. I no longer crave "the junk" that was once a part of my daily eating habits, yet I know this struggle is not over. This battle is won, but the war itself will continue. This time, however, I believe I'm far better equipped to fight than ever before.

This verse has become a prayer of mine. How I truly desire to please God in every way, to fully surrender an undivided heart in order that I may be worthy of what He has given me and called me to be. 39 pounds lighter and several sizes smaller than where I started this journey, I'm living proof of the strength of His power. There is no greater comforter and there is indeed no greater coach. (It's true, Carrie!) Please know if you're struggling in this way He can and will help you, too. Feel free to e-mail me via my profile if I can help by answering any questions or lifting you in prayer.

Several have asked to see photos. I have wrestled with this for a number of days and had nearly determined not to include them. I then remembered how God used things like this to encourage me before I began, so in that light, I've decided to post them.

Before:
178 pounds

After:
139 pounds

Giving thanks and praise to God...

Tracy

God is our Strength

Good morning! Hope this finds you well. I’m anxious to tell you about our weekend but it will have to wait...today is a busy day! (I can tell you it involved a weekend trip to South Carolina to see our boy!) In the meantime, I wanted to share this short but impacting message I received this morning from one of my favorite devotional writers…Jon Walker of Grace Creates.

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
~ Psalm 46:1 (NIV)

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God is our strength; he does not give us strength.

In other words, he doesn’t take our tattered strength and prop it up with support beams and steel cable. Instead, he moves into our weakness and he is strong.

Where we are weak, there he is strong.

My friend Steve Pettit tells an amusing story related to this. The storied missionary to China, Bertha Smith, came to speak before his small Kentucky congregation. She sat down with several people to pray, and when one young man said, “Lord, I just need strength; please give me strength,” blessed Bertha looked up and said, “Young man, God does not give us strength. He is our strength. Now pray it right.”

You can take away from that either a gladness that you never voiced a public prayer in front of the late Miss Smith, or a desire that there be more prayer warriors ready to teach us how to get it right when it comes to understanding Jesus working within us.

You, my friend, could be one of those teachers. Do you believe God can make you so? Your answer to this question reveals where the blockage is because God wants to transform you into a mother of the faith, or a father of the faith.

God believes in you, but he’s waiting for you to let him be your strength. I can’t, but God can.

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Cancer's Unexpected Blessings - by Tony Snow

A friend recently shared this moving essay by Tony Snow. You may or may not know the former White House Press Secretary was a devout Christian. This was his response when asked what spiritual lessons he had learned from his fight with cancer. It was published in Christianity Today in July of 2007. In July of this year, he passed away at the age of 53. It is quite long, but truly one of the most beautiful, impacting, faith-filled testimonies I've ever read. If you or someone you love currently has cancer, or if you've previously lost someone you love to cancer, I pray this will be an encouragement.

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'Blessings arrive in unexpected packages, in my case - cancer.

Those of us with potentially fatal diseases - and there are millions in America today -find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God's will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence 'What It All Means,' scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the 'why' questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care. It is what it is, a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths began to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But, despite this, or because of it, God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don't know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.

To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life - and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many non-believing hearts, an institution that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live fully, richly, exuberantly - no matter how their days may be numbered.

Third, we can open our eyes and hearts. God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease, smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see, but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension and yet don't. By His love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

'You Have Been Called'
Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet, a loved one holds your hand at the side. 'It's cancer,' the healer announces.

The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. 'Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler.' But another voice whispers: 'You have been called.' Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter, and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our 'normal time.'

There's another kind of response, although usually short-lived, an inexplicable shudder of excitement as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tiny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing through the known world and comtemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes ( Spain ), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There's nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue, for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Finally, we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the Holy City. From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.

We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us, that we acquired purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God's love for others. Sickness gets us part way there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy. A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two peoples' worries and fears.

'Learning How to Live'
Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God's arms, not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live. They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love.

I sat by my best friend's bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was an humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He restrained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. 'I'm going to try to beat [this cancer],' he told me several months before he died. 'But if I don't, I'll see you on the other side.'

His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn't promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity filled with life and love we cannot comprehend, and that one can, in the throes of sickness, point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don't matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

When our faith flags, He throws reminders in our way. Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it.

It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit. Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up, to speak of us!

This is love of a very special order. But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense. We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.

What is man that Thou are mindful of him? We don't know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us who believe each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place, in the hollow of God's hand.'

The Lord is our Strength!

After reading words from so many about the incredible growth and blessings associated with “She Speaks,” it comes as no surprise that many of these women and their families have come under attack from the Enemy this week. In the midst of our faith mountaintops, there is often a twinge of the bittersweet, in the realization of the eventual, inevitable valley. God undoubtedly used last weekend to strengthen and encourage these women in preparation for what was to come. I couldn’t help but think of them as I read my Streams in the Desert devotion for today. While much has already been said of “stillness,” I am compelled to share...

Summon your power, O God; show us your strength. (Psalm 68:28)

The Lord imparts to me the underlying strength of character that gives me the necessary energy and decision-making ability to live my life. He strengthens me “with power through his Spirit in [my] inner being.” (Eph. 3:16). And the strength he gives is continuous, for He is a source of power I cannot exhaust.

“Your strength will equal your days” (Deut. 33:25) – my strength of will, affection, judgment, ideals and achievement will last a lifetime.

“The LORD is my strength” (Ex. 15:2) to go on. He gives me the power to walk the long, straight and level path, even when the monotonous way has no turns or curves offering pleasant surprises and when my spirit is depressed with the terrible drudgery.

“The LORD is my strength” (Ex. 15:2) to go up. He is my power to climb the straight and narrow path up the Hill of Difficulty, as Christian did in Pilgrim’s Progress, and not be afraid.

“The LORD is my strength” (Ex. 15:2) to go down. It is often once I leave the invigorating heights, where the wind and sunlight have surrounded me, and begin to descend to the more confining, humid, and stifling heat of the valley below that my heart grows faint. In fact, I recently heard someone say, referring to his own increasing physical frailty, “It is coming down that tires me most!”

“The LORD is my strength” (Ex. 15:2) to sit still. And what a difficult accomplishment this is! I often say to others during those times when I am compelled to be still, “If only I could do something!” I feel like the mother who stands by her sick child but is powerless to heal. What a severe test! Yet to do nothing except to sit still and wait requires tremendous strength.

“The LORD is my strength!” “Our competence comes from God” (2 Cor. 3:5)

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It is my prayer this this may strengthen and encourage you today, whether you find yourself on the mountaintop or in the valley. May you rest on His strength alone. He is ever faithful.