Category: Uncategorized

It has been a while since I have been able to sit down and write. I have been spending some much needed time reading and learning. I have been asking God to speak to me and He has been faithful to show me things I need to see. I have recently been reading You Are Free by Rebekah Lyons. God is showing me so many things about myself in this book that I would like to share with you. If you are a people pleaser or performing for others in order to gain their approval, then this book is for you. Go get it!!!!!

Have you ever read a book and you underline almost everything you read because it relates so much to you? That has been me since I started reading this book! She is helping me see so many things. In the past, I would push myself and push myself until my body couldn’t take any more. I would literally make myself sick trying to please and perform for others. I was in a vicious cycle for many years. Rebekah writes, “I couldn’t hear God’s voice when my head was down, when I was pushing my own agenda or working to please others. I wore myself ragged trying to be enough, and it wore me out. I longed to be free.” I underlined those sentences and wrote out to the side, “Me”.

Can anyone else relate to that? Have you been running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off trying to make everyone happy? It’s exhausting! And more important, that isn’t what God wants for us. I knew deep down inside that this wasn’t freedom in Christ, but I didn’t know how to stop this vicious cycle. I had been this way my whole life and I didn’t know or understand how to change. I had been working my whole life to make people happy and I didn’t know how to stop. It was killing me and I didn’t know how to change. Rebekah states, “Growing up, I never understood my longing for approval was really an unquenched thirst for Jesus and His unconditional love for me.” Boy, could I relate to that statement!

There have been many layers to my issues. I have had to slowly go through them in order to be set free. It hasn’t been a quick process for me. Work, performance and pleasing were deeply ingrained in me. I was on the extreme end of the scale with those things. They consumed me. Rebekah writes, “When we become enslaved to anything, we miss out on a life of surrender and peace. A life where God is the Good Shepherd who gives us everything we need. A life where we lack nothing.” Boy oh boy is that true! I was missing out on so many things and I don’t want you to miss out on these things! I don’t want anyone to miss out on the freedom that Christ can bring us!

While I have been reading this book, I was reminded again recently that God made us to be human beings, not human doings. She says, “We cannot prioritize our doing before being, our assignment before healing, our service before freedom.”  He wants us “to be” with Him much more than He wants us “to do” for Him. It took me a long time to see that. When I can be alone with Him, I am so incredibly happy. And, if I can be alone with Him outside in my backyard, then I feel like I hit the jackpot. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, I feel peaceful. I love to bask in His creation. I simply love being alone with Jesus. But there are still days when that “to do” list looms in the back of my thoughts. I see so many things that need to be done and it distracts me from being with Jesus.  So, I am confessing to you that I haven’t completely arrived to where I want to be, but I am working on it! (ha ha!)

Because of my anxiety issues, I have struggled so much with feeling abandoned and alone even though I knew in my head that God was with me. There was a disconnect between my heart and my head. Through my journaling, God spoke to me, not audibly, but He showed me that my feelings stemmed from a childhood of abandonment. Of course that made perfect sense to me, but how do I get over feeling this way? He asked me, “Do you want me more or do you want healing?” I answered, “I want both!” I have to be honest here. Why couldn’t I have healing and have more of Jesus? Well….. He began to show me what I needed to focus on. I will share His wise words with you.

“Little one, I hear you and I see you. I want you to trust me to help you. Look to Me first. I am enough for you. You don’t need to strive or perform for me.” Those words…..”I am enough for you”  haunted me. Did I really believe He was enough for me? Obviously I didn’t. I needed to be reminded again that He is enough for me. If He chooses to heal me of my ailments, then He will. He is more than able to do that and I know that, but I had my priorities screwed up. I wanted healing more than I wanted Him. I wanted answers more than I wanted Him. He needed to point that out to me.

I needed to thirst more for Him than anything else in my life; even more than healing. Rebekah points out, “We are hardwired to thirst. In fact, thirst is said to be the strongest of all human urges. When we are thirsty, we will do anything to be filled.” So, I got down on my knees and cried and confessed to Him how I felt. I confessed that I was still striving and performing for others. I asked for His help so I could only thirst for Him and His will for my life. I confessed my need for His living water because He is the only one who can truly satisfy my soul.

So, friends I am learning day by day that I need to change. I struggle in certain areas, but I am asking the Lord to change me. I am going to leave you with a prayer by Rebekah Lyons. “My prayer is that we will begin to receive healing from our deepest wounds and discover that restoration brings true freedom. As we abide in God’s presence, where He informs and sustains us, we can serve from a new place of freedom. Confession, whether it be a confession of repentance or a declaration of truth, begets freedom. There is no shortcut or strategy. This is how we run free.”

I want to hold hands with my Savior and run free and I want that for you too!

Psalm 143:6 “I spread out my hands to you; I thirst for you like a parched land.”

John 4:14 “But whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Until next time….

I have talked a lot about different things that have affected me in my life. But I have to say that the one thing that I keep learning about myself is that there are so many layers to my issues. I seem to learn more and more about God and about myself every single day. Just when I think I might have things figured out, God shows me something new that I need to see about myself. He is so good at peeling away the layers at just the right speed so I can see and learn what I need to.

There have been many lies that I have believed about myself. But, there is one lie that I didn’t realize was so ingrained in me. That lie is “I am not good enough.” When I saw those words written in a Bible study by Lysa TerKeurst, I began to cry. I really didn’t realize until that moment that I have always felt like I wasn’t good enough. I began to look back at my life and there wasn’t a time that I didn’t feel that way about myself. 

It makes so much sense to me now. When you believe a lie about yourself, it affects everything you say and do. I never felt worthy, so that is why I became a pleaser. I tried to please my parents and everyone else so I could feel good about myself. I also became a works driven person. I felt like I had to push myself to perform for God and for others. I had to become what they wanted me to be in order to feel good about myself. I have functioned this way all of my life.

Lysa’s words on this subject helped to open my eyes to this lie I believed about myself. She said, “Never for one second did God look at us and say, My goal for this one is to simply be good enough. With Jesus, we are better than good enough because He steps in and fulfills what we cannot do on our own.” Because I believed I wasn’t good enough, I struggled all those years trying to please and perform instead of sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to His words. I became a Martha who felt like she had “to do” things in order to please the Lord.

Lysa states in Finding I Am, “We run at a breakneck pace to try and achieve what God simply wants us to slow down enough to receive. We receive from Him everything we need to produce the fruit, therefore we must remember to stay connected to Him. He’s into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling—all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace.” If I am brutally honest, I have never been good at the trusting thing because I wanted to be in control. That is why it has been easier for me to be a Martha than a Mary. Being busy was more comfortable for me than being alone with God. I was scared of being in trouble or what He might ask me or tell me to do.

While I have been thinking about not being good enough it made me remember something I read by Ann Voskamp in The Broken Way. She says, “Isn’t the fear that I am not enough really the lie that God isn’t enough?” That statement smacked me in the face. I hadn’t looked at it that way before, but she was right. I didn’t believe that God could handle me. I didn’t think I was good enough for Him. I believed that I had to keep pleasing and performing for Him all the time. I didn’t realize that He just wanted to be with me. He wanted to set me free from the pleasing and the performing.

With Easter just around the corner, I need to be reminded of why He died for me. He came to set us free from anything that enslaves us. That means that He came to set me free from pleasing and performing. He is more concerned with having a relationship with me than me doing things for Him. Galations 5:1 says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

I really want to live the rest of my life in freedom and not bogged down with things in my life that take me away from believing Jesus has set me free. Performance and pleasing need to go away! I need to believe what John 8:36 says. “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Satan doesn’t want us to believe this truth. He wants us to think that we aren’t able to live in freedom and he will do anything he can to make us believe that. I have fallen into that trap way too many times. I am fed up with myself!

This Easter would you join me in claiming the freedom that Jesus gives us? Would you like to put away all the sin that entangles you and look to the face of our Savior and lean on Him to fill you with His love and freedom? I want to claim His truth and His promises. I want to believe that I am free. Acts 13:39 says, “Through Him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses.”

I am going to leave you with some words from Rebekah Lyons. “Freedom is for everyone who wants it—the lost, the wounded, and those weary from all of the striving. It’s for those who gave up trying years ago. It’s for professional Christians hiding secrets. It’s for the angry and hurt, for those both brilliant and burnt by the Christian song and dance. I write for you, for all of you. You are the church, the people of God. You were meant to be free.” Can I get an AMEN?!

The minute Jesus died, He freed us from sin. His death means so much for us. We need to claim the promises He gives us. We are free! Until next time friends…

Have you ever had something that you are addicted to? “Hi! My name is Laurie and I am addicted to Diet Mountain Dew.” I love that gold drink and the taste of it. I love treating myself to a fountain drink every day at the gas station. Although I love that soda, I have also been convicted and told that it isn’t good for me. I have known this for years, but haven’t been willing to give it up because I feel like I deserve at least one thing in my life that is just for me. It has been my special treat! I know that might sound crazy to you, but I have hung on to that treat like a toddler does to her special blanket or pacifier. Because of recent events with kidney stones, I am finally giving it up. Although it pains my soul to do this, I know that I must. I can proudly say, “It has been ten days since my last drink.” Please pray for me!

I know that some of you can relate to wanting to hold on to something in your life even though it might not be the best thing for you emotionally, physically or spiritually. It is hard to let go of things that make us feel better. I knew that Diet Mountain Dew wasn’t good for me, but I wanted to drink it anyway. I was being stubborn. I didn’t want to listen to that little voice inside me that was telling me to “walk away from the soda.” I was acting like a stubborn sheep who wasn’t listening to her master’s voice. I was allowing another voice to lead me and guide me and when we don’t listen to the voice of truth, it can lead us down the wrong path.

I would like to share some information about sheep that I find fascinating. I found this information in the Bible study “Finding I Am” by Lysa TerKeurst. Sheep are defenseless animals. They are prone to walk off and get lost. They follow other sheep without thinking. They are also very stubborn and have poor eyesight. When I look at those characteristics, I find myself being able to relate to those cute, wooly animals. I have a tendency to go astray because I get so focused on doing what I want to do. I seem to get myself into so much trouble without realizing it. I also can be very stubborn and not realize it until I get myself into a messy situation.

Lysa tells a story about a particular sheep that I think we can all relate to. “He started eating some grass and while eating the grass thought, Wow, this grass is pretty good. The pleasure of immediately satisfying his desire probably got him off track, and he found himself not paying attention to the other sheep around him. And then all of a sudden he looked up, and all the other sheep were nowhere to be found. He probably didn’t have any idea he was off track. He may have been out of sync with the others for a while but had no idea.”

I can really relate to that sheep. I am a very focused and driven person. When I am doing something, I am so focused on getting it done, that I can easily ignore what is going on around me. I ignore the voice that is telling me to stop and rest. I ignore the voice that is trying to tell me that I am going overboard and need to step back and look at the whole situation. The voice that I am ignoring is trying to get me to listen to Him because He cares about me and wants to take care of me.

That voice that I am talking about is the voice of the Good Shepherd. In Jesus’ day and age, shepherds cared for their sheep in so many ways. At night, the shepherd would gather the sheep in an enclosure and become a gate for them. He would lay at the entrance so he could protect them and keep them safe through the night. During the day, he tried to make sure they stayed on the right path. But if one sheep were to stray, he would go and get that sheep and bring it back to be with the others. He led them with his voice. Because their eyesight was so poor, they relied on listening to their master’s voice. They trusted and followed it until they got focused on something else. Then, they would have to be corralled back into the fold.

One of the things I have struggled with the most in my life is believing that God is good. I know in my heart that He is, but when bad things continue to happen, I really struggle. That is why it is so important for me to focus on truth. Lysa says, “It’s so important that we stay in the presence of truth and actively keep the lies of the enemy out of our minds. Our thoughts are so powerful. We must make them work for us instead of against us.” It is a daily struggle for me to keep my thoughts focused on truth and not on the negative. I have to recognize the difference between lies and the truth and sometimes that is hard to do. There are many wolves out there that are dressed up in sheep’s clothing and we have to be able to recognize the difference and the only way to do that is to listen to the voice of truth. 

Just last night I was struggling with some issues and I finally realized that I really don’t deserve anything. I am a sinful woman who needs to realize that everything I am given is a gift. Each day is a gift. Everything I own is a gift. My family and friends are a gift. I think I have gotten so wrapped up in the answers I don’t have that it has made me frustrated and doubting God.

Lysa TerKeurst poses this question. “I wonder sometimes if I want the answer to the cry of my heart more than I want God’s plan.” That question really made me think. All of my life all I wanted was my Dad to love me. Now, there isn’t anything wrong with wanting my Dad to love me. But, I became consumed with it. Everything I did was to make him love me. I became so wrapped up in pleasing him that I forgot that I had a heavenly father who loved me even more. I didn’t realize how much God loved me until I was in my forties. Instead I made myself sick trying to please my Dad. My Dad made my heart ache and I longed for a relationship with him. That ache has stayed with me and it has affected every part of my life.

I feel things deeply. I long for things to be right in this world. I want a “happily ever after” for everyone. I really do! I hate all the evil and bad things that are happening in this world. It makes me sick to see people hurting and families falling apart. But, when I focus on just the negative, that is when I get in trouble. I wish there was a news channel that would show us that some good is happening in this world. But, all I need to do is look around me with a grateful heart. I need to focus on the little things that I see that God is doing in my life and in others.

The bottom line is we have a Good Shepherd. John 10:11 says, “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.” With Easter approaching, I need to be reminded that Jesus laid His life down for us. He became the sacrifice that we needed so we can have eternal life with Him. There wouldn’t be any hope for us if He wouldn’t have done that. When I get discouraged or frustrated I need to remember what Jesus did for me. He became my Good Shepherd and He continues to care for His sheep every single day. I might not understand His ways, but He would never to do anything to harm me because it simply isn’t in His nature.

I pray these words will be helpful to anyone who is struggling or doubting out there. I can relate and we need to pray for one another and focus on truth. I am going to leave you with one final verse. Until next time dear friends….

Psalm 92:15 proclaiming, “The Lord is upright; He is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in Him.”

There are a few things that I have struggled with most of my life. One of them is fear and the other is abandonment. When I was a little girl, I never felt safe in my home and I felt very alone. I kept most of my fear bottled up inside for years. I’m talking 40 years. That is a lot of trauma to keep bottled up inside! I wanted to protect the lie that I had been living for so long because in a strange way I thought I was protecting myself. I didn’t even talk to God about it. 

God has been working on me for years to open up to Him. Even though He knows what I have been through, He still wants me to talk to Him about it.  He wants me to bring it into the light. He wants me to tell Him “I am afraid” or “I don’t like this” or “I feel like I am not going to make it.” I had gotten into a destructive habit of not speaking things out loud to Him. Now, this might sound silly to you, but I have learned that things need to come into the light before they can be dealt with. If you keep things bottled up inside, that is not healthy. I had to come to the point where I felt safe saying things out loud to God. He really wanted me to tell Him things so He could help me deal with them.

Psalm 86:1-7 says, “Bend down, O Lord, and hear my prayer, answer me, for I need your help. Protect me, for I am devoted to you. Save me for I serve you and trust You. You are my God. Be merciful, O Lord, for I am calling on You constantly. Give me happiness, O Lord, for my life depends on You. O Lord, You are so good, so ready to forgive, so full of unfailing love for all who ask your aid. Listen closely to my prayer, O Lord, hear my urgent cry. I will call to You whenever trouble strikes, and You will answer me.”

He wants us to run to Him for help. That concept was hard for me to learn because I didn’t have anyone in my life that I felt like I could go to for help when I was a little girl. So, I believed a lie that there was no one to help me and I only had myself to rely on. Even though God knows what is going on, He still wants us to tell Him how we are feeling and turn to Him for help. King David has always fascinated me because he pours his heart out to God throughout the Psalms.

I would like to share a journal entry with you. “God, I have struggled so hard to find you and know you. You are my father and my friend. You want to hold my hand and walk with me. I don’t have to succeed to please you. You are pleased by me reaching out to you and asking you to help me live my life. You look at me with loving eyes and not condemnation. You know exactly what I need and you promise to supply my needs. I have felt so vey alone most of my life but I am never alone because you say you are with me. I need your comfort Lord. I need for you to hold me and never let me go. You are my kind, gentle and loving heavenly father. You accept me and love me because I am your child. You want me to pour my heart out to you and you want to wipe away my tears. I need your arms wrapped around me every day of my life. You are my God and I will trust in you.”

I have learned that God wants me to be brutally honest with Him and ask Him to help me in every situation. I have to get out of my mind and speak my thoughts out loud to Him. It is the only way I can deal with what I am feeling. For instance, I have to tell God when I am afraid and not beat myself up for being afraid. I have always been ashamed of my fear and very unwilling to admit it. I berate myself because God tells us to “fear not.” But, recently God asked me to look at that phrase a little differently. He told me that He is telling me not to fear because He is with me and taking care of me. He isn’t shaking his finger at me telling me to “fear not.” He is lovingly telling me that He doesn’t want me to fear because He is working and taking care of me. He wants me to tell Him when I am afraid so He can help me.

I have recently been shaken a bit with a medical condition that I have battled for a long time. I have gotten kidney stones for 40 years. Those little buggers are so painful and horrible. I usually can pass them on my own but there have been times when I have to have surgery to blast them so they will come out. Last week was one of those times. I am always fearful of surgery and this time was no exception. The doctor had to put a stint in and it was causing tremendous pain. I felt like I was going to die. They kept telling me to take more pain medicine, but I don’t like the way it makes me feel, so I tried to manage it on my own.

All of the emotions of being in pain and not being able to do anything about it came rushing back to me. When I was a little girl, one of my Dad’s favorite sayings was, “Pain doesn’t hurt!” So, I believed a lie that there was something wrong with me if pain hurt. My body was remembering all the years I suffered in silence with the pain I was in emotionally and physically. I didn’t have anyone to cry out to. I am telling you that when I was in pain I hid it from everyone; even my mother. I suffered in silence. But that is not what the Lord wants us to do. He wants us to cry out to him. I have had to teach myself to cry out to God. I have to allow myself to call on Him to help me. That has been a foreign concept to me for so many years. I actually told myself that I was a cry baby if I told God how I felt. And if I am honest, I told myself that He would let me down and not answer me. I was playing the comparison game between my earthly father and my heavenly father.

I have been reading Ann Voskamp’s book “The Broken Way” these past few months. She is teaching me so much! I would like to share a few things with you that she says.

1. “Trust Him in all this brokenness. It is a gift.”

2. “Abandonment is always a soul’s worst fear. Even when life abandons you, you are in the arms of God.”

3. “Satan’s literal name means ‘prosecutor.’ What seems to be undoing you, can ultimately remake you.”

4. “Something holy happens in broken places.”

So, I have decided that I am going to cry out, yell, scream, whatever I need to do to be honest with God about how I feel. I am going to trust Him in all my brokenness. I am going to trust Him with my pain. Pain is a sign that something is wrong. Even when I feel abandoned, I am in the arms of God. I am going to cling to the fact that what seems to be undoing me is going to remake me. And finally, something holy is happening in my broken places. I am not going to be ashamed any more for my feelings. I am going to fall at my Savior’s feet and ask for help.

My friend Patti sent me this verse because I asked for prayer for my shaken soul. 2 Corinthians 12:8-10 “Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time He said, ‘My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.’ So, now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

I am giving myself permission to boast in my weaknesses so that Christ’s power can work through me. We live in a world that doesn’t like to talk about the things that make us look weak. We shy away from sharing these things with one another. We want to look like we have it all together. But, I look at Paul and his mindset and I see how much God changed him. God gave him the strength to endure and He will do the same for us. Let’s ask Jesus to help us finish the race strong dear friends knowing that He has a holy work to do in our broken places! Until next time…

Happy Valentine’s Day! When I was a little girl, I remember getting so excited to go to school on Valentine’s Day. Our teachers helped us decorate Valentine bags with our names on them so the other kids could place their Valentine cards in them. I couldn’t wait to see who gave me a card and then see if someone I liked might have placed something special in there. (Those were the days!) I still love to get a card or a note because it really does makes me feel special. I even save my cards because I just can’t throw them away!

I think, no I know, that God’s love is so vastly different from any human experiences that we have ever had in life. Some of us have been blessed by being surrounded by lots of loving people in our lives. Some of us have had a few loving people in our lives and others have had none. We all come from different situations and some of us like me, have a hard time grasping what it is like to be loved by a heavenly father who loves with a perfect love because my earthly father was not so good in the loving category. Our earthly parents are our first encounter with love in our lives and if they are not so good at loving us, then our belief system is formed that we aren’t worthy of love. “If one of our parents can’t love us, then who can love us,” becomes our core thinking. 

For me, love has been painful and hard because of the experiences I had with my Dad. I did everything humanly possible to make him love me. I tried so hard to be what he wanted me to be that I almost sacrificed my sanity. Those of you that know me think I actually lost my sanity, but I am claiming it is still there! Ha Ha! I have regretted wasting all those years trying to get my Dad to love me until recently. I started reading Ann Voskamp’s book “The Broken Way” and came across this paragraph that made me think of myself. She says, “Jesus risked Himself on me. How can I not risk my life on you? You may not love me back. You may humble me, humiliate me, reject me, shatter my heart, and drive the shards into my soul—but this is not the part that matters. What matters is that in the act of loving we become more like the givenness of Love Himself. What matters most is not if our love makes other people change, but that in loving, we change. What matters is that in the sacrificing to love someone, we become more like Someone. Regardless of anything or anyone else changing, the success of loving is in the how we change because we kept on loving.”

I used to beat myself up because I continually tried to show my Dad love and he shattered my heart and drove the shards into my soul like Ann mentioned. But, now I see that I was doing my part because I was loving him like Jesus did. Now, I am not saying that anyone should allow someone to physically hurt them. I am talking about loving someone with the love of Christ. I didn’t realize until later in life that I needed boundaries with my Dad. Boundaries are good and we should have them. The mistake I made was continually watching for him to change. I felt like it was my job to make my Dad change and see the errors of his ways when in reality it was God’s job. I put myself in the wrong position. (Oldest child syndrome)

Love can be complicated with some people and it can be easy with others. Love can hurt and it can also bring you joy. God created us to love one another. He also commanded us to love. So how do we love those people out there that say cruel things, hurt us continually, disagree with us, cuss at us and turn their backs on us? We have to get on our knees and pray. Pray for the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with God’s love even when we don’t want to. I hate to admit it but there are a few people out there that I would prefer not to love. I don’t even want to be in the same room with them. There are people out there that have hurt me to the core of my being. But, I am commanded to love them. So, I have to pray (sometimes through gritted teeth) for them and ask the Lord to forgive me for not loving them. I have to be honest with the Lord about my feelings and ask Him to help me change. I can’t do it on my own!

Before I can love anyone else, I need to realize how much Jesus loves me. I can’t love others until I fill my love tank up with the love of Christ. I can’t love others if my love tank is empty. I have to focus on God’s love for me and allow Him to love me before I can love anyone else. This has been a huge struggle for me most of my life. I really have to focus on scripture that tells me how much God loves me. I have to tell myself that I am loved by God. I also ask Him to tell me He loves me over and over again when I pray and spend time with Him. Allowing God to love me has been hard. I have built walls around my heart and it has been hard to let them down. But, I have learned that God’s love is so good and He would never hurt me. I can trust Him.

I personally know that I need to love more than I do. I need to pray for it more and I need to demonstrate it more. It is so easy for me to put up my protective wall and let someone else do the loving. But that isn’t what Jesus calls me to do. Love is risky. You put yourself out there when you love. You open yourself up for rejection and hurt. But, so did Jesus. He put Himself out there every single day of His life. He was loved by many but He was also rejected by many. He was spat on, yelled at, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. He did all of that because He loved us so much! Yikes! Now if I am honest, that makes me want to run and hide instead of love.

So, this is what I have to do. I have to look at Jesus and say, “Because you love me, I want to love like you do. I want to live my life for you. You know this is hard for me because I have been hurt so many times. I need for you to give me extravagant love for others. I need to look to you for help because I can’t do it on my own. I can’t love on my own. I need to open my heart to your love flowing through me. Help me to love so and so because it is really hard for me to love them. Forgive me for having such a hard time. Please fill me with your transforming love and thank you for loving me! Amen!”

If we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us, then we are capable of loving the difficult people in our lives. I have to remind myself that if Christ can love those who spat on Him, then so can I. If He can love those who rejected Him, then so can I. If He can forgive those who hated Him, then so can I. If He can love those who hurt Him, then so can I. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” 1John 3:16

I am going to leave you with some thoughts by Ann Voskamp. “I am what I love and I will love you like Jesus, because of Jesus, through the strength of Jesus. I will love when I’m not loved back. I will love when I’m hurt and disappointed and betrayed and inconvenienced and rejected. I simply will love, no expectations, no conditions, no demands. Love is not always agreement with some, but is is always sacrifice for someone. We are all lovers compelled by love. Love or war, the answer is one and the same: I surrender.”

You are loved by the creator of the Universe dear friends. Our world doesn’t teach us to love like God does. I pray you will have your love tank filled with His love today and every day! Until next time…