Fortitude

            If you are at all like me, you probably have no idea what that word means. I only learned of this wonderful word because of a Christmas present my husband bought me. On the Shoulders of Hobbits: the Road to Virtue with Tolkein and Lewis by Louis Markos contains a chapter titled ‘The Courage to Endure’. Fortitude expresses the steadiness of character that is lacking so often in our lives today. Frodo is probably one of the best examples of fortitude. With everything set against him, he faithfully sets one foot in front of the other, heading towards a mountain that in all likelihood will defeat him. Now, while sometimes I feel like Frodo, I know that because I am a child of God, I do not tread a road towards my ultimate demise. On the contrary, I tread the only road towards happiness, blessing, and grace for all eternity! The path might be filled with obstacles, and they might even be large and scary obstacles, but those obstacles will run out, and then, oh then the gate to the Celestial City!

            I find myself thinking about fortitude today, mostly because I have had a pretty rough weekend. I was ill, and as you ladies can probably identify with, emotionally a wreck. While there is a perfectly logical explanation for these ridiculous mood swings, when I am in the midst of them it seems as though I am stuck in a whirlpool with no way out. Looking back on those hours of almost despair, I wonder if they would be lessened by a greater portion of fortitude in my life. Practicing fortitude, the steady, everyday courage of knowing that each step is as important as the last, well it doesn’t really exist in my life. Yet, I don’t think classical scholars would have included it in the list of virtues if it truly had no value in life.

            I pray for you, my sisters, that God would pour an extra measure of fortitude in your life. May we learn together the value of steady endurance, courage that only is revealed after years of constant effort. In our world today, it is easy to get caught up in the instant reward of so many things. I challenge you this week to look for the things that have taken years to accomplish and think about how valued those accomplishments are to you.

Victory Song

Dear Sisters in Christ,

            I have a wonderful thing to share with you today. Jesus is LORD Hallelujah!

            Last night, Satan mounted a sneak attack on my soul. Fear is an area where this King of Lies easily gets a foothold, and this was the gateway he made use of.

            I had a bad day yesterday. I didn’t feel well, had a really bad headache that just wouldn’t quit, and in general felt horrible. My husband put some hot tea in me, and tucked me into bed, fully anticipating that a night of good deep sleep would fix all wrongs.

            Little did we anticipate how the enemy could strike when all defenses were down. I had a terrible nightmare last night. Satan gave me a dream, which, if possible, seemed even more real than reality. When I initially woke up I thought I had just lived through a horrible memory! As wives there is always the potential for fear that our husbands will leave us to find someone more attractive, skinny, athletic. I did not say there is always the fear, but that there is always the potential for the fear. This is what Satan preyed on last night. I am not going to share the details, mostly because it took me a long time to get the images out of my head last night, and I am in no way going to open myself to put them back in there.

            The amazing part of this story begins when I began to weep on my husband’s shoulder, and he woke up. Now, if Satan’s plan had worked, upon finding my crying on him in the middle of the night, my husband would have been extremely put out that I woke him up in the middle of the night. We would have gotten into a huge fight, and Satan would have succeeded in driving us apart. But what happened instead, was that Jesus imbued my husband with a wonderful measure of grace, so that he asked me what was wrong, listened, and understood immediately that Satan was attacking us. Still showing mercy and grace to me, he prayed over me, talked to me and helped me realize that there was no truth to what had happened in my dream. Because Christ poured His love over my husband, I was able to fall asleep with visions of guardian angels filtering out all the evil dreams Satan tried to send.

            I am so thankful to God for His mercy. I am humbled by my wonderful husband’s actions, and am blessed by his gentleness. God is victorious, sisters, and He will give us victory too!

Yours in Christian Victory, Rachel

Confession Time

I am tired. I am tired, and frustrated, sick of feeling weak and helpless. This week has been really hard. I have been struck more than once, by my crushing need of God, and worse, by how often I shrug off that need and try to walk without my Father’s hand to guide me. Really, it is no wonder that I feel tired, my spirit is probably black and blue from all the times I have fallen down on my face by trying to walk on my own.

            I don’t know if any of you struggle with this, but the moment that I am struck by how much I need God, I start to come up with all these ways to keep myself more in His presence. I look at my life and realize how much time I devote to things other than serving God and spending time in His presence, and I get depressed. In response, I try to fix myself.

            In writing that I realize that likely my trying to fix myself is part of the problem. I don’t need a 5, 6, 7, or 11 step program to give myself all the rights habits. Not that building more godly habits is bad, but it won’t fix everything.

            I NEED God, and where do I find Him? In prayer, and in His Word. When I feel the crushing weight of my need of Him, I need to turn my eyes on Him, throw myself at His feet in prayer, and into His Word. Only this will bring me closer to Him, and allow Him to fix my faltering feet. Only HE can fix me. I cannot fix myself.

            God, I pray that I will remember to always throw myself at Your feet when I feel the crushing weight of my need of You. Please remind me that I cannot fix anything, only You can fix me, only You can fix anything that is broken. You are the healer, and I am the patient, not the other way around. Forgive me for treating You as though You were only the medicine, and not the Doctor.

            Please work Your perspective in my life, that I may see the world around me with Your eyes. I can pray this only because of Christ paying the ransom for my sins. In His Name, Amen.

“Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a Righteous person is powerful and effective.”  James 5:13-16

Trading What We Want to What He Wants for Us

             I was going to write about the Isaiah 55 passage that preceded my first blog, and it will still relate to what I am about to write, but this strikes me as more important.

            Reading my Bible today I came across a very small verse that struck me in the context of a much longer passage. In Luke 14:25-35 Jesus is speaking about discipleship and the cost of following Him. I won’t quote the whole passage, but it would be beneficial to read. Following two illustrations of how much being a disciple will cost the people that are contemplating following Him, Jesus says this, “So, likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he has, he cannot be my disciple.” Stop for a moment and let that sink in. Everything. Try counting up all the possessions you would miss having around, and then look at how many things you still have left around you that didn’t make it on the list. Pretty staggering? Mine was too.

            If this is the end of the story, then it is no wonder that so many Christians balk at this truth. After having a fantastic conversion experience, suddenly we come across this little verse and think, wait. Jesus saved me just so He could take away my family, my financial stability, my friends, my health, my happiness, for the not easy work of following after Him? I’m not so sure I really want this anymore.

            Thankfully this is NOT the end of the story. The second part comes in the verses from Isaiah that I quoted last time.  Those verses show us what Jesus wants to give to us in exchange for us surrendering everything to Him. I have decided to memorize this passage and make it one of my life verses. I'm going to work through this passage backwards, so hang with me.

            God wants to give us the sure mercies of David. Now, in the context of the prophecy this was taken out of, these sure mercies of David probably refer to David’s unbroken line of kingship in Israel. However, David had a lot more mercies in his life than just that. God had anointed him to be a leader from birth. Then as a youth Samuel anointed him as the next King of Israel. God guided David through a tempestuous relationship with Saul, the current King of Israel, gave him a precious friendship with Jonathan, kept him safe through all of Saul’s hunting him, and his various battles with the Philistines. As a King, it wasn’t like David was perfect; in fact, he committed adultery (an offense punishable by death by stoning under the Leviticus law), and then murdered the woman’s husband to try to cover up the inconvenient proof of the sin.  Even so, David is usually remembered in the Bible as “the man after God’s own heart.” He was blessed, and those blessings continued all the way down the generations. Those are a lot of blessings for us to look forward to!

            God wants to give life to our souls. We know that God is the only One who can bestow either life or death to our souls, and that without Him our souls will die.

            God wants our souls to delight themselves in fatness! All of you foodies out there, I don’t know about you, but this is staggering to me. My soul can delight itself in fatness; I didn’t know fatness in any sense was good. Yet here fatness stands for abundance, so we can be sure that God wants us to be abundantly blessed. This fragment of a verse speaks volumes to me. The abundance that I long for is this spiritual abundance, not the dissatisfying abundance of food that Satan wants me to settle for consuming!  God’s abundance cannot be consumed, it cannot be anything but good for us in our lives, and it will NEVER run out.

            God wants us to be satisfied. He states this in a question. Why do you spend money on what is not food, and your labor on what does not satisfy? I could ask myself this question many times. God wants us to be satisfied, but we lose sight of this truth so quickly, and fall once again for Satan’s lies.

            Finally, God wants to GIVE all of this to us. I know I get so lost in everything I should be DOING as a Christian that I forget about how much God wants to give to us. Those of you who are mothers can probably understand this even more than I can, He is a Father, and parents long to give good things to their children.

            I hope that this can serve to highlight the goodness that God wants for us. I also hope that in some small ways all of you can be inspired and strengthened to search out the holding places that Satan has gained in your lives. Find out the things that you allow to distract you from the goodness God wants from you. Throw out the old habits that hide the best that God wants for you, replacing His free spiritual food with ‘junk food’ that only feeds your guilt and need.

In the polishing process, we are being shaped into a treasure fit for the King of Heaven.

The Call, The Journey, The Fears

Princess Stones

“Ho, every one that thirsts, come ye to the waters, and he that has no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfies not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let you soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.”            Isaiah 55:1-3

            If there is one thing I HATE to talk about, it is food. Not because I don’t like food, but for the very opposite of that. I LOVE food! The problem is that I do not love it in a healthy way. I am ashamed of my relationship with food. Our relationship is rather like an affair, torrid moments behind closed doors. Sugary beverages downed in a hurry to get rid of the evidence of another failure to repress my urges.

            While I know that the passage above is not really about food, I also know that my torrid love affair with food is not really about food. My cravings and addiction (yes that is what it really is!) stem from a desperate longing inside of me. This longing is one we all share. As women we long to be enough, not just good enough but enough, pure and simple. We aren’t. We aren’t enough, and because of that all of us have things, little bad habits, addictions that we can’t shake. We all have things that eat us up inside, but we don’t tell people, because we swallow the lie that we should be stronger than this. We shouldn’t need help overcoming this; it is too small, too far beneath other’s notice. I know, I’ve been there, recently too. And it is all a lie!

            Ladies, I’ve been amazed recently at how hard Satan works to keep us from realizing our full potential in God. I know four women who posses amazing spiritual gifts. These women are strong prayer warriors. They love their husbands and their children without reserve. More than that, they love God with every fiber of their being, and all of these women have something in common. They all struggle with not being enough.

            I want to say a few things right now. These things might shock you; I pray that God helps them resonate within your souls like they have in mine.

          #1. It is a lie that you should be able to fix yourself by yourself. Christianity is not a religion of isolation. We are given a communion of saints so that we can know the comfort of not being alone! Even Jesus got lonely. The disciples traveled with companions, and Paul talks in his letters about the comfort he gets from knowing that people dear to him (FRIENDS) are praying for him even while he is under house arrest!

            I am so thankful for the husband God has given me. I am able to share with him my deepest fears and struggles and not only does he listen without trying to fix it right away (a huge feat for most men) but he is the first one to pray with me, to go to the Word and find promises and strength where I have none.

           

            #2. Satan DOES NOT lie when he tells you that you are not enough, he lies when he tells you that you SHOULD  be.

            We can NEVER be enough, and praise God for that! Can you imagine the pressure? I know you can, because we all put it on ourselves, and that is the problem. Can you imagine the joy we would live with if instead of hanging our heads in shame when we hear that we aren’t enough, we just laughed at Satan and said, “Of course I’m not enough, silly, I don’t have to be because Christ is!” Not only will the Name of God send the devil scurrying back into his dark hole, but we will be unbound by his lies, centered on the truth.

            God has something special for each one of you to accomplish. Yet each one of us so often comes up against a wall when we try to follow God’s call on our lives. I believe this is because Satan is terrified by what will happen to our families, our friends, and the world we live in if we actually finish our tasks! I’m embarking on a journey to see the struggle for what it really is. My addiction to food? I’ve discovered that I am not getting enough of the spiritual food I need. Writer’s block? Satan doesn’t want me to write, which tells me that God is going to give me something to say one of these days. Feelings of unworthiness? I have a hunch that once we shake off the shackles and allow God to move within us, unencumbered by doubt, caution, fatigue, and all those other things that come up the moment we decide to really follow God, we are going to know that in Him we are worth more than we ever imagined.

            I promise to tell the truth in this blog. The purpose is to let you know that you are not alone. I will be giving ideas of how to stand against Satan’s lies. One way for me is the act of writing this very blog. I have always felt called to write, and at the same time, completely helpless to say anything people would want to hear. Thanks to my dear Mom and my husband, I am going to give God the very best I have to offer, and leave the results up to Him.

            Please leave comments. If you have a specific struggle I would love the opportunity to carry you in prayer. If you have an idea of how to stand firm against the enemy I would love to hear it. If you have a scripture that speaks to this journey, or one that God has given you in relation to your own journey, I would love to read it. Let me know what you think, and if you would, pray for me as well!

In the overwhelming flood of Christ’s love, we are all Princess Stones, being polished by His grace.