Finding Rest

I'd planned for today to be a "productive" one. I had all sorts of errands and chores planned for myself after church this morning. I was going to go shopping for an outfit to wear to an upcoming wedding, I was going to clean out closets and sort through clothes to give to Goodwill, I was going to search various websites for the best airline fares for my trip to D.C.

But after several days of glorious springlike weather, today was cold and rainy, altogether dreary. And instead of spending my afternoon shopping and cleaning and buying airline tickets, I took a nap. It's been a while since I've had a good, long Sunday afternoon nap. Boy, did it feel good. Boy, did I need it, not just for my physical body, for my soul as well.

Too often I measure my "productivity" by how many activities I can cram into my day. I make to-do lists and take great satisfaction in marking each accomplishment off with a bold sweep of the pen. On days where I start a half-dozen tasks at work and don't complete a single one, I feel like a failure. Currently I'm working on the next issue of our magazine at work, which normally would be at the printer by now. Due to some extenuating circumstances, it will probably be a couple of weeks before it goes to print, which is frustrating to me. I feel like I haven't been productive enough.

This need to feel "productive" extends to my spiritual life as well. If I haven't studied my Bible today or spent a long time in prayer, then I feel like I haven't been productive for God. I'm constantly wanting to make the most of today, to take advantage of the time that God has given me and not squander it. But what if He's not calling me to read 17 chapters? What if He's calling me to rest, to relax?

I can mark a zillion things off my to-do list and still not accomplish what God has called me to do. Sometimes He calls us to act. Sometimes He calls us to rest. Today, I need rest.

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." Matthew 11: 28-30

Hoping that you have found the rest your soul needs,
Lisa

A Recurring Theme

My prayers vary from day to day, depending on what's going on in my life. Some are short and sweet, emergency-type prayers ("Help, Lord!") while others are filled with thanksgiving. More often than not, they're also filled with requests and petitions for myself and on behalf of other people.

While I ask for a variety of blessings for my life--good health, peace, patience, etc.--my prayer requests seem to boil down to one central request, wisdom. I almost daily ask for wisdom about pretty much every aspect of my life: my job, my relationships, finances, service to God and to others. You name it, I need wisdom in every area.

So much of Proverbs speaks about the benefits of seeking wisdom:

"and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding." Proverbs 2:3-5

"Get wisdom, get understanding; do not forget my words or swerve from them. Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding. Esteem her, and she will exalt you; embrace her, and she will honor you." Proverbs 4:5-8

"Choose my [wisdom] instruction instead of silver, knowledge rather than choice gold, for wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare to her." Proverbs 8:10-11

"Listen to my [wisdom] instruction and be wise; do not ignore it. Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord. But whoever fails to find me harms himself; all who hate me love death." Proverbs 8:33-36

There are many more verses that speak to the need for wisdom, but you get the point. Wisdom will always be on my "permanent" prayer request list. I think the more I receive it, the more I recognize the need for even more of it in my life.

Are there any recurring themes in your own prayer requests? What do you find yourself continually praying for?

Where Two or More Are Gathered...

Is there anything closer to Heaven than praying with dear friends? I have an active prayer life on my own, but praying with people I love and trust just takes it to a whole 'nother level.

Tonight after work, I met my friend Stacye to go walking at our church's Life Center. After our walk, we found an empty classroom and spent some time sharing different things on our heart and praying over them. There are few things more refreshing to me than having someone pray for me. How I need it!

If you get the chance this week, spend some time in prayer with a friend or two. You won't regret it.

Friends Like These

Nearly everyone in my office, myself included, is participating in a 10-week Weight Watchers program at work. I was only wanting to lose 5-10 pounds (I'm already at the 5 pound loss mark two weeks into it, hooray!), and I knew participating would help motivate me to eat better and exercise more (especially since we have weekly weigh-ins). I eat out pretty often with my co-workers, so since just about all of us are participating, that makes it easier to keep each other accountable for eating healthier food, not to mention less food altogether.

Having my co-workers participate in this program has made sticking to it a lot easier, because we have the same challenges and goals, and are able to support and encourage each other (with a little good-natured mocking thrown in for fun every now and then).

Today I was thinking about how important it is to have people in my life who can support me, not only through weight-loss regimens but through more important trials as well. This week has been very hectic and stressful at work, and I've been able to call on my life group and other friends to pray for me. Several of them have checked in on me to see how the week's going, and that's been a HUGE encouragement. There aren't many things better to me than coming home to have a friendly message on my answering machine or an encouraging e-mail.

I've been very blessed to be able to lean on these friends. Since I live alone, I can feel somewhat isolated sometimes, and this week has been a good reminder that even when I feel alone, I'm truly not.

So to my friends who read this, thanks for your support this week (and countless times before). "I thank my God every time I remember you." (Philippians 1:3)

Scripture I'm Chewing on This Week

"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Matthew 6:34

Confessions

I have a confession to make: I'm not good at making confessions. It's definitely not on my top 10 list of favorite activities. To be honest, it's probably the element of prayer where I most fall short.

I'm not sure exactly why that is; pride certainly plays a factor. But I also think that for so long I have not recognized the importance of confession. It's not that I think of myself as perfect or sinless--believe me, I know I'm not! There are just so many times that I launch into prayer, full of praise and adoration and thanksgiving and requests, but I leave out confession, not deliberately but because I have not given it much thought. Lately I've been convicted that confession is a necessary factor in our prayers, in our worship to God.

The Bible clearly connects confession with forgiveness and healing. Throughout the Old Testament, whenever God was fed up with the rebellious Israelites and ready to destroy them, He always relented whenever they recognized their sinful ways and confessed them to God.

In Psalm 32, David talks of the suffering he faced when failing to confess his sin: "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord'--and you forgave the guilt of my sin."

Confession is again described as a key element to healing in James 5: "Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."

When I fail to confess my sins--and I mean confess them in a specific, deliberate way, not a quick "Please forgive my sins" glossing-over--am I not limiting the effectiveness of my prayers?

Sometimes when I DO confess, to God and to others, I find myself making excuses. Just last week I blogged about having a bad day and blaming it on hormones run amok. Regardless of hormone levels, stormy weather or traffic jams, I had the choice of whether or not to be short-tempered, grouchy, irritable.

John Ortberg speaks of this in his book The Life You've Always Wanted. He writes:

"At the heart of it, confession involves taking appropriate responsibility for what we have done. This is not easy to do. We try to slip out of it. What starts as a confession often ends up an excuse. 'I didn't mean to yell at you; I was having a bad day.'

"To confess means to own up to the fact that our behavior wasn't just the result of bad parenting, poor genes, jealous siblings, or a chemical imbalance from too many Twinkies. Any or all of those factors may be involved. Human behavior is a complex thing. But confession means saying that somewhere in the mix was a choice, and the choice was made by us, and it does not need to be excused, explained, or even understood. The choice needs to be forgiven. The slate has to be wiped clean."

There is something awesomely powerful about being forgiven by someone who truly knows you and who knows what you've done. God obviously knows everything about me and every sin I've ever committed and ever will. When I openly, specifically confess my sins to Him, I recognize that I have wronged Him, and that He is so incredibly merciful to offer His forgiveness to me. That gift of His unmerited favor should keep me from wanting to commit those sins again--not that I can fully achieve that, but I become more and more aware of how I do sin against Him, which leads to confession, which leads to healing...the cycle continues.

What are your thoughts on confession? How do you keep it a consistent part of your own prayer time? How can the church as a whole make confession just as important in our worship as praise and thanksgiving?

Listening to God

This has been one of those really up-and-down weeks. I've had days where I feel very aware of God's presence and filled with joy in what He's doing in my life. I've also had days where I question the direction of my life and wonder why I'm not somewhere else doing something else, something that I deem more "meaningful". My job in particular has been demanding and stressful, and I've wondered several times whether I'm adequate to do this job and why I'm there at all.

My head knows that God has a plan and purpose for my life, but sometimes my heart has a hard time buying that. Especially when my vision for my life doesn't match up with what He envisions.

Last night at church our class talked about the importance of listening to God. It's an aspect of communication that I so often fail to do with Him. Lately I've had a lot of questions about my life, about the direction of my career and of my life, and yet I've been too impatient to wait for God's response.

This morning during my prayer time, I asked God to speak to me, and to shut my mouth and open my eyes and ears to what He had to say. To say that He responded quickly is an understatement. I was overwhelmed at how "vocal" God seemed to me today.

Part of my morning Bible study was from Psalm 32: "The Lord says, 'I will guide you along the best pathway for your life. I will advise you and watch over you. Do not be like a senseless horse or mule that needs a bit and bridle to keep it under control.' " (vs. 8-9, NLT)

As if I needed further confirmation of God planning out my life, I also read my sister's blog about her struggles to understand and follow God's plan for her life, particularly in her own career. Through it, God reminded me that He does know what's best for each of our lives, even when it seems like He's unaware.

On my way to work I heard a message by Charles Stanley about having hope in the midst of storms. When I got to work, my daily e-mail devotional was about God not wasting anything, good or bad, that's happened in my life. On and on God continued to speak to me through other people, through music, through His Word.

How much I would have missed if I'd simply given my prayer requests like a diner placing an order in a restaurant, without waiting in anticipation of God responding. O God, teach me the art of listening to You expectantly, patiently, humbly.

Soul Dusting

First, let me give a quick plug for my sister Carrie’s new blog. She is an incredible writer (runs in the family, ha ha) and has a lot of wisdom to share. Take some time to stop by her blog and leave some comments.

Ever have one of Those Days? A day that you wish you could do-over? Today seems to be that way for me. It’s a day that started out with a lot going for it—it’s Friday, it’s sunny and dry for the first time all week, I’m not too crazily busy at work. All indications pointed to it being a really good day.

However, that’s not taking hormonal factors into account. I won’t go into detail, but you ladies know how volatile our emotions can be when hormones start fluctuating. So I was feeling a little blah this morning before I even got to work.

Later in the morning I found out that some plans I’d made for next week were unexpectedly changed. I was quite disappointed, and the emotions kicked into high gear, just amplifying my disappointment. It didn’t take long for me to be seriously bummed out and more than a little sensitive.

Long story short, I ended up ticking off one of my friends, which just added to the day going downhill.

Enter the dust rag. Our office building has been undergoing major renovation for the past few months, and now that it is finally completed, our boss decided that this afternoon we should dust our offices to clear our all the dust that’s been kicked up by construction. Some dust I could see pretty clearly in my office, but there was some dust that I didn’t see until the rag picked it up. Now that my office is cleaner that it has been in a long while, I feel a little better.

I think my soul’s in need of a little dusting itself. Over the past few months God’s been doing some major renovations in me. As He removes things that shouldn’t be there and brings in new things, it can get a little dusty. A rotten attitude, regardless of hormones, needs to be swept out. A gracious and loving attitude needs to be spruced up.

Someone hand me a rag…

Crossing Boundaries

I have a problem with boundaries. Not talking about physical ones (I don't leap the fence at the lion cage at the zoo, for instance), but the emotional, intangible boundaries. I've had relationships and friendships where I went to opposite extremes, either letting someone in way too far, or shutting them out altogether. The last couple of years I've prayed a lot about boundaries, and God has blessed me with a lot of wisdom and insight, but it's still an area that I struggle with.

Ever have dysfunctional friendships/relationships? Ever have a friend or family member take advantage of you? I've had some fair-weather friends in my life, people who only seem to want to be around me when things are going well and drama-free. Conversely, I've also had people in my life who only wanted to talk to me when they had problems they wanted me to somehow solve. Both types of relationships are unhealthy. And I have struggled in the past with setting boundaries in these relationships, with wanting to maintain these relationships and avoid getting hurt in the process.

This morning I read about Moses going up on Mt. Sinai to meet with God (Exodus 19), and how God told him to warn the Israelites to stay behind the boundaries at the base of the mountain and not try to follow Moses up there. The fact that God would allow anyone to approach Him was, at that time, unheard of. God's presence was awe-inspiring and fear-inducing, and many people wanted to get as far away from Him as possible because He was so overwhelming. God set up boundaries, not only at Mt. Sinai, but also in the tabernacle and later in the temple to keep His glory separated from the people, in order to protect and preserve their lives.

When Jesus died on the cross, the veil in the temple was torn, a symbolic act of the boundaries that separated us from God being destroyed. As I read about the boundaries in Exodus 19 this morning, it hit me that God endures some extremely dysfunctional relationships with us. How many times do we only praise God when everything's going great in our lives? Or how many times do we only talk to Him when we need something?

God's no doormat, He doesn't allow us to walk all over Him. But His desire to be with us is so great that He's willing to tear down boundaries and endure our imperfect, dysfunctional ways. He sets Himself up for a lot of hurt. But that's how great His love is for us.

God, thank You for tearing down the boundaries that separated us from You. Thank You for putting up with us when we take You for granted. You are so merciful and gracious to us. You are so worthy of our praise and adoration!

Scripture of the Week: Romans 12:12

"Be glad for all God is planning for you. Be patient in trouble, and always be prayerful." Romans 12:12 (NLT)

Tonight I sat next to my sister at the Ladies' Night Out dinner at our church. She is a pretty faithful reader of my blog (thanks, Carrie!) and she asked when I was going to add more to this particular post, since I wrote the above verse a few days ago and promised to add more.

I'd intended to write some long grandiose monologue about this verse and what it means to me and how it's impacted my life this week, but it's been a really hectic week. I took a quick overnight trip to a meeting in beautiful Fort Payne, Alabama, and I've been busy with friends the rest of the week. It's one of those weeks where somehow I end up planning something for nearly every night of the week.

Some times I find myself thinking of all the things I'd do if I had the time to do it. I often dream about what I think or hope God is going to do with my life. But I so rarely take the time to actually enjoy where I am right now. Not only should I be glad over what God is planning for me, but I should also rejoice in what He has done and is doing in my life. Slowing down and taking the time to savor each moment makes a big difference in my attitude, particularly when I get into worry-mode.

Another point about this verse: it's overwhelming to realize that God actually HAS a plan for my life. He knew that this would be a crazy week for me, and He knows how it fits into His plans for me. Remembering that He has everything mapped out and timed to perfection also helps keep my worries at bay.

Finally, the reminder to always be prayerful is a further way of releasing worry to God. I've had a lot on my mind this week, a lot to pray about, and the more I life those thoughts and worries and requests to God, the less I dwell on them and the more peace I gain.

That's why, in the midst of a busy week like this one, I'm able to sleep well and relax, knowing that God's in control. Sometimes it takes a chaotic week to bring more order to my prayer life, because it's then that I'm really dependent on Him.

Whether your week has been hectic or calm, take a moment to reflect on how God's been in control. Realize that every moment of your life has been mapped out by God. Thank Him for how He's guided your life so far, and praise Him for all that's He going to do. Today, savor each moment.