A follow up thought to my Ghandi post

In the bible study today the quote began to take form.

Whose kingdom are we serving? Are we serving God, truely serving Him? If we are we will have His fruit of the Holy Spirit in us. We would seek to obey and do His will with all of our hearts.

Are we serving satan? He carries evil like a second skin and a person can have an innumeral amount of demonic activity in their lives.

God can't voliate his nature. "We have become immune to sin so that we don't understand that sin in our lives separates us from God. God called each of us to be holy and set apart. We are to be in this world. but not of it. Sadly, many of us are "leavened " by the things of this world. Then we wonder why God's power is not evident in our lives or our churches." Bibical Foundations of Freedom by Art Mathias

This may be why we are not so liked amongst those we are trying to share Christ with. We are doing our own things saying that its okay that we do them even if someone else is convicted of the very thing we are particpating in.

A quote from Ghandi

"I like your Christ. I do not like you Christians. You are so unlike your Christ."

This quote has me thinking in the last couple of days as to what is it that we are doing wrong? Where are we not showing the love of Christ to our friends, family and to those in need that we have yet to meet?

My pastor brought up something in our service yesterday that I hadn't considered and is a strong part of my personality for those who know me. I can become a mother lion and protect my friends when they've been hurt. And recently I did let my anger get to me when a friend did get hurt and I took that offense on myself. I've done it for my daughter and for my husband several times over the years.

Do we take offense in areas where we really aren't suppose to? Battles that aren't ours to fight? God has already won the war and if you don't know the war I'm talking about read Revelations. We win. So why are we still fighting battles that God has already won?

There are only a few times I've protested something. Abortion is one of them. As I think more of how I handled myself in those arenas, I have to say its not really my nature to stand on a street corner and hold a sign. I did it once, but I don't think I'll do it again.

I am finding out the one area that we can always win a battle that we are currently fighting as we are living in a world that is not our own. Prayer and fasting. Those arethe only weapons we have that we will never lose.

Christ never protested anything and I think He had plenty to protest about while He walked the earth. He approached people with a gentleness and a kindness that they weren't used to being in whatever condition they were in whether it be an illness or sin. He didn't judge them for what they were doing. He showed them how much God loved the people He created and how He wanted a relationship with them. He gave up His own life to prove that fact.

So why aren't we doing the same? Why are we saying we are doing things in the name of the Lord when its not something He would do?

Trying to set boundaries

In every journey there are boundaries that need to be set such as distance, time, and other areas to make the journey more successful and enjoyable.

In the past I've had fifty day journeys where I picked a topic that I wanted to learn about or improve in my life or something that needed to be taken out of my life and worked at it for fifty days.

This is the first time I am doing a year long journey and its on day 25 and I've done very little since the begining of the year.

Most of my journeys are ones that God has led me to be on, and there are those that I got to pick the topic.

This is one where I picked the topic but God is definitely in the lead. Actually He's had several topics in mind and He leading and I'm following rather blindly into unknown territory.

I am finding out that I've dealt with rejection for most of my life but never really faced it head on as for what it really is. I think I learned from an early age to put up a wall so it wouldn't hurt when it did happen. I found out a few weeks ago that that's considered a passive aggressive attitude towards myself where I hide from my own self and then get angry because I didn't stand up for myself when the time arrived. I found that I had been creating the problem myself moreso then what I was seeing it.

Yes there are times where I know I was rejected. But not as much as I had percieved it.

This journey was suppose to be about studying the 2000 years of Charismatic Movement and its kind of went on a different path to letting go of past experiences and just learning to trust that God has not forsaken His own. This is one journey I unknowningly had in the works for many years and it is now coming to pass. It won't be a long journey but there will be an end to it and it will not be in my life anymore.

Offenses seem to come alot in our church services and activities. The other night while I was praying and asked for forgiveness for being offended over a comment made a few minutes before, God told me one word that I've hung onto and I passed it on during our prayer service.

It was Obedience. When God calls you to do something, we must obey and do it. In 1 sam 15:22b it says "it is better to obey then to sacrific".

I am learning that I've been doing a lot more of sacrificing with my passive attitude towards things rather than being obedient to what God is calling me to do. Today my goal is to be more assertive for my residents who are in my care.

One thing about working for God, you get assignments all the time!
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My daughter

Normally I refrain from talking about my daughter and her antics but I felt I need to just so people know the truth.

She is a wonderful daughter and we couldn't be more blessed. As I was once told when she decided to leave church for a while "She is finding her God." I had trouble with that statement at first but then I began to understand it.

God is God. He will always be God. But when you look at Him as a Father, there is a different component to Him. My experiences in my life are not going to be her experiences. What she learns in life will gain her knowledge in God that I will never know.

She's smart and she knew since a young age that drugs were not going to be in her life. She's not a health nut but she does try to eat so that her blood sugar doesn't go out of wack. I say this because sometimes people generalize kids when they walk away that they will get into trouble. I'm sure there are things that she's done that we don't know about, but I know that drugs aren't one of them.

She's honest. If she knows she can't do something, she'll tell you. However as a mom, I could see things that she could do even though she would say she couldn't do them.

She's loyal and faithful and trusting. If she says she's going to do something 9 times out of 10 she will. The one time she doesn't, something came up that she didn't plan on.

When Dani graduated from highschool she didn't leave much behind, but she did gain and take with her great qualities to start off life in this enriching world. God speed my child.

Learning to break a mindset

I really had a wake up call in 2009.

My mindset at the time was that I thought I had to match my husband's income. Due to the amount that we are paying out of pocket in med bills and insurance I felt that some of that was my responsibility to take care of as it seemed in the last five years most of the bills were coming from me.

Last fall after I graduated from my CNA class my plan was to work my full time day job and work part time as a CNA to keep my licence current by working 400 hours in a 2 year period. Working a full time job and a part time job would equal my husband's income and help to pay off bill sooner. Not that we were in that much of a financial breakdown.

However about mid October working this way was not feasible. There were circumstances that came up that required me to quit my full time job, the one that I was most secure at.

I didn't know the mental damage I was doing to myself in this belief. I am still working myself through this transition. I still have the fear of losing it all, something that won't happen as we are doing okay with my working my one job that varies from part to full time and my hubby's employment.

Christmas was the hardest for me. I shared with a friend my struggle as she knew I was used to working several jobs at one time and now just working one. I was shopping for presents and was done with that, had no problem shopping for my hubby or other family members. But when I started shopping for what I wanted to add to our Christmas weekend as Dani was coming home, I panicked. I didn't want spend anymore money.

Even when I was done and showed the shopping list to hubby it wasn't an issue to him, but to me it was.

The other end of the spectrum is that we have set ourselves up to not need much, even though things around us fall apart like our furniture or the house in actuality once those are replaced, we are fine. We are used to running things to the ground and replacing them later. We don't see the need to update unless there is a need. Our goal since we were married was to not have any expenses that if we had to take minimum wage jobs we could still afford to live on what we have. We have succeeded that goal for the most of 21 years.

Some days I think I have conquerored this mindset and then there are times when I still have to work my way through it. I've also had to change my thinking that something has to pay for itself in order to continue working the project such as my writing activities, gardens and such. Granted five tomatoes, six string beans, 20 pea pods and four serving of lettuce may have closely covered the cost of a strawberry pot, but not by much.