Everything is Secondary

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