Running

So I have been having a really rough week. Emotionally I have just been really down and pretty much spent. I have also been so exhausted. I sleep at least 9 hours a night and sometimes during the day, if I don't drink caffeine often enough, I feel like I can't survive unless I sleep.

All in all, its just been a crazy week. I've found myself crying a lot. I've found myself sleeping a lot. I've found myself going and going a lot.

The one thing I haven't found, is myself in the Word.

I think because the week has been so hard on me, that I've just put off my time with God because I either felt like I wanted to just survive or I felt incredibly tired.

Yesterday, I realized that I had a major issue with how I approached the rough times in my life. I have had a lot of personal things going on in my head. I've messed up and been hurt. But the biggest mistake I made was not turning to Jesus.

There were times intermittently that I would talk to God and come to Him with my hurts, but all in all, I didn't put God has my highest priority. I can know this for sure because despite my busy week, I still made time to work out three times. Spending time in the Word got no time.

Last night I started feeling better, I started feeling like I wasn't just trying to keep my head above water throughout this week and with that feeling, came conviction. How did my actions over the past week reflect Christ as my Savior? I mean I needed help and encouragement this week. A lot of it. Why did I not go to the one that I profess to love the most. It's like I just gave up. In fact, I know I gave up. I was so exhausted from keeping afloat.

As I was laying in bed last night I began to reflect on a bible study (that I haven't done in forever) that I am currently doing on Abraham. I'm only in the beginning parts of it, but one of the key things that is show in Genesis 12-15 is that God rewards obedience to Him. Not rewards like every time you do something great, He will give you something great. But it pleases Him when we are obedient and therefore He rewards us, whether we see the reward now or later.

This led me to really sit and think with God....What is it, specifically, that I need to obey?

The Lord led me clearly to a couple of things:
-I need to fight for my time with Him and with His Word. That means everyday, fight for it.
-I need to extend grace, whether I am given it all the time or not. I need to unconditionally extend grace.
-I need to let go of my pride. There are too many times when I don't extend love or affection because I am too proud to be soft. Or I get angry and bitter when I don't make the best grade, because deep down my pride in my grades is hurt. I need to let go of the pride.

I went to bed last night thinking....neat, cool....now what? I want to change my heart about these things, but how do you do it. Do I just say "heart...CHANGE NOW!" So I fell asleep wondering, how in the world could I help to get my heart right. I decided that I would wake up this morning, run (hopefully waking me up enough to get through quiet time without falling asleep) and then I would dig through these things with the Lord.

Well I didn't even realize that the Lord had plans for my run. He wanted to teach me half of the lesson by running. I still am going to dig in the Word with Him right now, but I wanted to write down what I had learned on my run before I forgot.

I realized that my biggest problem is perseverance. I don't FIX my eyes upon Jesus...upon the Cross...Upon the shame He carried WILLINGLY.

the definition for fix is to settle definitely; determine. A definite settling. My biggest problem is when times get hard, when I hurt, my eyes become unfixed. They are not fixed on Jesus anymore.

This morning, running, Hebrews 12:1-3 became so real to me:

¹Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,

²fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

³For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

I think it is so neat that our christian life is compared to a running a race. Having just run myself, I know that there are points in the run where the wind is beating down on me and I am running probably as fast as I could walk. There are also times when obstacles are in the way...brush, cars, people. All of these times take endurance, to keep pushing.

There is a race set before us. A race hurts sometimes (like when your chest and legs are burning) but we are called to endure because Jesus died on the cross so that we would "not grow weary and lose heart". I grew weary and definitely lost heart this past week. Because it was such a rough week, I decided to start walking and feeling sorry for myself. Not because I deserved it, but because it was easier. It is so much easier to just finish a run by walking. But to endure and finish well, that is where true determination and endurance lies. Choosing to press on, despite hurt.

God has revealed so much to me this morning through this run. I think He has given me a glimpse at how to work on all of those things that I need to be obedient on...I need to endure and persevere and LOOK TO WHAT JESUS DID ON THE CROSS.

There is a race set before you and me...I have to face it. Whether we run or not, it's there. It's not a choice, this is what accepting Christ looks like. It will be us striving to run the race well because it was "set before us". I pray we run it with great endurance. Hopefully when we have weeks like I just had, we run, we persevere instead of walking. I pray that we grab hold of grace and let it be our strength. We could never run this race on our own. We will always grow weary and lose heart if we are on our own. But fixing our eyes upon Jesus andgrabbing hold of the grace He offers us daily, we will not only be refined but we will never grow weary or lose heart.

For me that is such a comforting thing after a week where I truly did grow so incredibly weary and I know that I allowed myself to lose heart.

I'm not so good at memory verses but I think that this is going to be mine for this next week or so. I want this to be my constant encouragement and challenge as I walk through my day.

One final thought to spur us all on. There are two definitions of perseverance on dictionary.com:

1. Steady persistence in a course of action, a purpose, a state, etc., esp. in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement.

2. Theology. continuance in a state of grace to the end, leading to eternal salvation.

I'm praying for perseverance for us all. Until the end, let us persevere together in this race that has been set before us.

A Jonah Moment

Last semester I got into this amazing mentoring relationship with a woman from church, Meredith. One of the things that I expressed to her was that at times I have this huge passion, but it gets stifled by the fact that sometimes I just don't know what to do with it. This manifests itself sometimes in feeling like I'm not getting much out of my time in the Word, or even in prayer. I guess I needed a little direction on how to be a disciple.

What was really cool about this relationship is that I could truly see God working in bringing us together. First off, Meredith has a heart for teaching and equipping people to take the Word and to discern what God meant for us to understand through it. Basically, she has a heart for people gathering their own meaning from the Word (different than twisting it for what you want) instead of relying on commentators to do the critical thinking for us. It is amazing how much God can reveal to us if we just simply approach the Word for ourselves. So she taught me how to do the inductive bible study method which I love learning. It was amazing the connections and meaning you see when you simply observe all of the details in the passage. The cool thing about the method is that you pray and seek to see what the LORD is speaking in this passage, not what you want it to say. I think that there is definitely meaning in the Word that is not up for interpretation...it just has ONE meaning, whether its to teach a lesson, or simply to reflect on God's character. You can learn and understand lots of different things from the one meaning, but in the end, there is only one thing God wanted us to hear. Some are a lot easier to discern than others, but in general, we can study the bible for ourselves instead of relying on all the commentaries and study bibles.

Okay wow, that was all just background to tell you the real story haha. So last semester Meredith and I studied Jonah and I learned this new bible study method. It was so cool and I learned so much from the story of Jonah. What was even better is that I did it on my own. What is really neat is that today I realized that the events of yesterday and today have totally tied into what I learned about in Jonah. I had a Jonah moment.

Fast forward to yesterday. God completely humbled me and ruined my plans about the CPA exam. That's right, I am no longer taking four parts of the CPA exam before graduation and marriage, I am only taking three. This was not me deciding it was too much, oh no, I HATE changing from the plan. For some reason I got it in my head that I HAD to get all of the sections passed before I got married because it would make my life miserable if I didn't.

Enter Almighty God. Well little did I know that I was about to get schooled on what it means to truly let go of control. Until yesterday I didn't even realize how big of an issue I have with control. I was going to CONTROL when I took the exam so I could CONTROL how happy life would be after the exam. I set up all of these different study times so that I could CONTROL how well I did on the exam.

I was doing little walking in faith. I was doing a lot of walking in Jessica-mode. I thought I knew how to do the best in the situation and I really did feel as if I was honoring the Lord by working my hardest. But I think when I look at the root of it, I wanted to control exactly when, where and how I studied for the exam.

Okay, so let me back up, why can I not take the exam? Well it turns out that it has taken the state board of accountancy a lot longer than expected to get my paperwork done, so I have not gotten signed up for the test that I am supposed to take in a week and a half. You probably are thinking, "Jessica that is SO much time"...well I thought so too, until everyone else said that every city surrounding College Station is basically full and there are no locations that have open spots to take the test. What's even worse is that at the end of February we are supposed to take the second section of the exam...but all of the spots are full then too. People are resorting to taking the exam only a couple of days after our class is done, leaving next to no time to review.

I personally was just overwhelmed...these were people who had already signed up...I hadn't even paid for my exam, which is the step BEFORE you actually sign up for the exam.

I came home and prayed about it and I just broke down to Jesus. I admitted how much I wanted to control this and how I had no idea what I was going to do. I confessed that I had taken off on my own path and was trying to make my way His way. It was in those moments that the Lord started to soften my heart to taking one part of the exam later. I started to realize that really, there is no reason not to. I have 11 weeks in the summer that Reed and I will be unemployed and just hanging out. I still had a hard time though breaking free from the "plan" that was set forth by our program...oh and almost instantly the enemy attacked with lies that I was being lazy and that choosing to take one less test means that I was a slacker.

I tell you what though, the more and more I reflected on this new plan, the more I realized that this was such a blessing...the Lord had literally chased me down and made me sit and think about what I was doing. I was going and going, studying and studying that I did not stop to think if there was any other way. This reminds me so much of how Jonah was, running away from the Lord.

But God was faithful. He captured him from his rebellion.

God was faithful with me and captured me from my sin of CONTROL.

The sad thing is, I have totally reflected Jonah's later actions as well with my thoughts and words today.

After God chases down Jonah and gives him a second chance to fulfill his call, he goes to Nineveh and does what the Lord commands.

BUT when the Lord has mercy on Nineveh Jonah becomes angry and basically goes out to the countryside and pouts because he thinks that God should have destroyed the city because they deserved it. He was angry at God for having mercy on the people of Nineveh.

Well slightly different, but slightly the same is how I acted towards the PPA office in my thoughts and words today.

I started to get angry and bitter in my words towards them because in my mind, had they let me know that I needed to get certain paperwork in before hand, I would not be so behind and I would be able to take the tests on time. I basically sat and complained to Jennifer this morning because of how the PPA office had wronged us.

I feel like I just spat in the face of my Father. Oh wait, I did.

I basically am still in the mindset that it would be better to do things the other way and that I am going to let the PPA office know it because they should have helped me out more.

Wait...isn't that how the Lord showed His face to me...through the brokenness of seeing that things were not going to go the way that I planned, but the way the God had planned.

And who am I to not have mercy on the administrators...My Father has mercy with me daily.

I seriously had a pout party this morning about how angry I was that they didn't tell me what I needed to do. I could have rejoiced at how the Lord had moved in the whole situation, how He caused me to walk in faith by losing the control that I so clung to.

Instead, I get bitter towards the people "responsible".

Thank goodness my Abba is a forgiving Father.

Thanks to anyone who read this, I just needed to confess how off base I have been today. Oh and I'm sorry if it doesn't make much sense...the Jonah parallel I think clicks better in my head than how I've written it.

learning

I feel like Jesus is teaching me a lot lately about what being in a relationship with Him looks like.

As sad as it is, when I "talked" to Jesus in prayer in the past, I didn't realize how stuck I was in the image of me relaying a verbal letter to heaven. I don't know that I ever truly looked at the room around me and thought, "Jesus, you are right here, you are sitting beside me...I can just speak."

I know this sounds really simple and maybe a lot of other people have already got this figured out. But I think that I was a slight bit off from really understanding that Jesus is PRESENT right now with me. I don't need to orchestrate a long and eloquent prayer. He is my Father, sitting right beside me. Why would I send a letter in the mail to my roommate knowing she was right there all along? I guess its kind of the same concept for me.

It makes the times I listen to worship songs in the car so different.

"When I think about the Lord, how He saved me, how He raised me..."
When I sing those words, in my thoughts I can speak to Jesus beside me and say, When I think about You Jesus, about the day You saved me, how You raised me. The real deal Jesus is sitting next to me, smiling as I shower Him with that praise. I reflect on my salvation story with the one who saved me...it makes it so much more meaningful and my heart just flutters. Before when I would think of that, I would sing it thinking of Jesus, reflecting on how awesome He is, but not consciously thinking, "Jesus, your sitting here and I want to tell you that this is my heart song to you."

It's kind of like the difference between me singing a corny Michael Buble song to Reed and singing it by myself while thinking of Reed. Singing with him next to me makes it so much more intimate...as if you can hear the heartbeat of our love.

I'm working on this in my relationship with Christ. God is so good and so incredibly faithful to continue to teach me this, to broaden and increase my definition of a "relationship with Christ".

I'm not sure where the Lord is taking me with it from here and I'm honestly not sure how much of this makes much sense to anyone else reading. The difference between how things were and how I am looking at them now are so DRASTICALLY different, but explaining the difference feels like I'm splitting a fine hair...So I understand if its not especially easy to understand what the heck I'm rambling about.

Kind of off topic a bit, but I need prayer for transformation of my time in the Word. I am hungry for true meaning out of the Word, but sometimes I can get intimidated and feel as if I'm not getting the full meaning and depth out of it. I am learning this cool new way of reading the bible that has been really fruitful (it's called the inductive bible study method), but I'm not completely sure how to do it just yet, so I'm still yearning and grasping for the fullness of the Word. God will grant us the desires of our hearts and I know He will be faithful.