Going home for Christmas break I was really in desperate
need of God speaking to me.
Just some background: I am in Birmingham, it has been
challenging being away from my family and everything familiar to me.
Going home I was in bliss. I woke up hopped out of my bed to
find my parents cooking breakfast and presents under the Christmas tree. It really was too good to be true. We had no school worries,
job worries, all we had to do is enjoy our vacation with family. Side note:
Fairhope really is the most quaint, homey place in the world. (If you disagree,
you have every right to be wrong).
As always, God came through for us and lifted our sprits
with powerful message.
The first thing he spoke to us was this: When coping with
every day life we have the ability to strategize, learn about ourselves, make
plans, make back up plans, read books about who we are as humans. All my life I
have collected little things like this along the way the most recent ones
being: grace, the importance of community, the power of vulnerability. I have always been the same way. I’ve always been a learner.
I love learning new ideas, new things about myself, about God, and about how to
relate to other people. I think I secretly was waiting for that one book or
person that was going to teach me how to be completely self sufficient and how
to be great at everything. Little did I know… All of these things are
NECESSARY realizations. So necessary in fact that God teaches us about them.
But what God spoke to me was that although these things are God breathed,
necessary, and beautiful, they are SECONDARY. We will continue to learn them,
and continue to collect these little tidbits about life. What I needed God to
tell me though was that I struggle when I convince myself that any one of these
things will sustain me, when ultimately only he can do that. God wanted me to
understand that yes, these things are beautiful, and yes, he thinks it is sweet
that we collect them. BUT he has granted us a trump card called Jesus Christ that
beats even the most strategic strategy of living. And I
feel like every person that reads this has had this thought before. And it just
seems so impractical. But we’ve decided that it has to be real and it has to be
practical. And we decided we want to spend the rest of our lives figuring out
how we can make it more practical, because these little lessons we learn are
all seasonally relevant. We needed to learn grace when we lacked in giving
ourselves enough. We needed to learn the value of community when we realized
how tough life can be when you’re trying to figure it out by yourself. And we
needed to learn the power of vulnerability when we realized, it was the key to
becoming a more wholehearted person. But Jesus and the easy yoke he provides,
is timeless. And we want to know more about it.
Today we’re headed home from Fairhope and this is the
beginning of us trying to set this into motion. For my own sanity I need Jesus
to be my primary source. He is the cheat code. In a hard moment I have the
choice to rack my brain for the best plan that I can come up with. Probably one of the biggest problems we have is trying to
diagnose ourselves in figuring out why were feeling the way we do. - OR
I can take the easy and much less commonly used approach, I can trust, worship,
pray, or just say Jesus.
-Tori
-Aaron
