Longings Fulfilled

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. Proverbs 13:12

It’s amazing to me how true this verse is. I feel like lately, God has been fulfilling several of my longings (or maybe I’ve just been more aware). I longed to have a husband who loved and cared for me radically, and have enjoyed being married to God’s gift of a husband to me for the past 9 months. Not all of the longings are as big as marriage though. I longed to do yoga in a Christian environment, and just recently got to experience the beautiful fulfillment, that keeps going! Also, I longed to provide a space for women to be: be themselves, write truth, experience peace, and so much more. This past Saturday was a small start at doing just that, in light of a larger longing that God has placed within me.

As I was filled with joy and life at each of these fulfilled longings, I realized something more. Not only did God fulfill these hopes, these longings of mine, but he was also the one who GAVE me the longings in the first place.

It is said that God will give you the desires of your heart when you delight in him (Psalm 37:4), but he is also the one who places many of those desires in there to begin with!

It’s like God gives us double gifts when he gifts us with deep desires or soul longings, and then he gifts us again when he satisfies and fulfills those longings.

It gives me hope for my longings yet to be fulfilled. The ones that have been deferred for a while, but my heart has not grown sick, because I’ve experienced so much life from other longings fulfilled.

What are some longings that you have? In what ways has God fulfilled some of your longings already? Have you delighted in God, and has he given you desires that have yet to be fulfilled?

Pray with me:

Father, thank you for being the giver of good gifts. Thank you for the many longings you have fulfilled in my life. Thank you for the desires, the dreams, and callings you have placed within me. I pray I can rejoice at these gifts, and steward them well. I pray I can be patient with the process you have me in to reach the fulfillment. May you get all the glory as you fulfill the deepest longings of our soul.

Amen.

UNSUBSCRIBE

How many useless emails do you get on a daily basis? I’m always one for a deal, so I seem to find myself signing up for an email discount, and subsequently receiving multiple emails, sometimes daily from the same places about things I neither want nor need.

I find myself almost every morning, weeding out all of those meaningless emails to find the few good ones that actually contain valuable information for my life. Years upon years of spending time reading through subject lines and deleting thousands upon probably millions of emails, and today, just today, I unsubscribed. Thinking it would be too much of a hassle to unsubscribe from these countless emails, I just dealt with them because I thought I had to.

I “suffered” through the daily bombardment of countless emails unnecessarily! All that I had to do was simply scroll to the bottom of the email, and hit that joyous word UNSUBSCRIBE. It was much simpler than I thought, and got me thinking about some other things I was possibly avoiding because they seemed complicated, when they might actually be quite simple.

Maybe that means actually writing that thank you letter that you meant to send to your grandma

calling that friend that you lost touch with
cleaning up the mess in the sink (it will probably take less than 2 minutes- you can do it!)
Folding the clothes
Saying you’re sorry

Sometimes, we build things up in our heads to make them scary and huge, when a simple action can rid us of the worry and anxiety we create for ourselves.

If it actually ends up being bigger, sometimes the simple act can be a good start, and makes it easier to act again, and again, and again.

Unsubscribe.

Pay Attention: 1 Year Later

Last year, yesterday, I wrote a blog post called pay attention (thanks FACEBOOK for telling me!). Yesterday (this year) I had another “pay attention” moment. At the moment I am in Costa Rica, it is 6:45am, and I am waiting to eat breakfast that starts at 7. Yesterday, the group of world changers I am with decided to go white water rafting. We got all signed up, strapped up, and then trained up to prepare ourselves for the crazy waters ahead. Our guide taught us some commands like: “forward” meaning we all paddle forward; “lean in” meaning there are rocks nearby and we should lean into the boat lest we fall out; “get down” means there is extremely turbulent waters and the whole crew needs to get in the boat and weather the storm until it passes; finally, he told us the commands for the various sides like “left side back, right side forward” meaning we need to somehow turn the boat to maneuver it down the river. This was all very adrenaline pumping and while we were thinking about our safety and listening to the commands, I realized I was paying no attention to anything else going on around me besides the people in my boat. As soon as we encountered some peaceful waters, I had to intentionally remind myself to look up and remember where I was-in COSTA RICA-and enjoy the beauty that surrounded me before the next Rapids engulfed my mind.

After this amazing rafting experience, I was reflecting on how much my life is like white water rafting in many ways. Between a full time job and ministry, grad school, a serious relationship and managing other relationships with family and friends among countless other things, my life often feels like one rapid after another. Managing the boat, steering in the right direction and screaming “forward!” to the rest of my soul. In those times, I have little time or energy to enjoy my surroundings and rest.

Like the peaceful times in the raft, I need to intentionally remind myself of where I am and often who I am, in the moments when I can rest and relax. It wasn’t until those calm spots on the river when I truly started to recognize and embrace that I was rafting in Costa Rica with my friends and we were working together so well to navigate the waters.

The last command our guide constantly shouted at us was “STOP!” Where we stopped paddling forward or doing what we were doing to just ride the river.

While I am experiencing my time of rest and fun in Costa Rica, I want to make the most of it and enjoy it to the fullest! However, I now will take back this little piece of wisdom to “pay attention” when I stop.

I hope you can do the same, wherever you are!

Fear in His Hands

Oh Lord please forgive me for deep down in my heart

I’ve realized what I’ve harboured almost from the very start.

See I’ve always had plenty, yes, more than enough,

but somehow I still worry that one day I’ll have none.

So I fret and I fear of the future trials to come.

And work and save up to pay for the potentially large sums.

I work day to day, honorable enough I am sure,

but, see, my motives are not always very pure.

For somewhere along the way I have wrongly presumed,

Continue reading “Fear in His Hands” →

Do not click like…

Approval. Likes. Shares. Favorites. Retweets. The list goes on. With our social media crazed world, it’s easy to fall into the trap of approval and trying to please others to gain compliments or attention. I just started reading a book called The Well-Balanced World Changer and in the first section it has two quotes.

The first is from Bill Cosby:

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.”

The second is from Bob Dylan:

“What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast.”

Wow. Way to really hit it close to home God. Thanks. For a lot of my life I have been a people pleaser who thrives on people’s compliments and accolades. However, thankfully, I have learned and am still learning the power that we give others when always seeking their approval. We can get caught up in the momentum of the like, but realize we may not even like ourselves. Some even go as far as being paralyzed with fear because of a decision they will have to make that may have the possibility of making someone unhappy.

Taking it a step further, what about God?! In John 5:44, Jesus says,

“That’s why it is hard to see how true faith is even possible for you: you are consumed by the approval of other men, longing to look good in their eyes; and yet you disregard the approval of the one true God.”(Voice)

Looking for approval on the human level, cramps creativity, and sets yourself up for a lifetime of chains and defeat. Looking for Godly approval brings both creativity and freedom back into our lives because we have the ability to live out his purpose and plan for our lives.

We can freely be ourselves and let others learn who we are when we stop trying to impress them or gain their like.

“How then can we, we who try to embody the way of Jesus in the modern world, claim to hold God so high and yet still put so much worth on the words of humans?” -Sarah Cunningham (The Well Balanced World Changer)

If you like this, then don’t click the like button and forget about this, live it out and evaluate how and from whom you seek approval.

EllaSmilesBlog

Category: Tuesday mornings.