Well...I made it!

I made it to Tuscaloosa and back again...and I did it without my laptop and without blogging. I wish I could say I did it in perfect obedience and without struggle...but that is not the case.

Yet, throughout this time of struggle and being made intensely aware of my weakness and inability to do even one very small thing for the Lord on my own...how sin is always right there with me...how likely I am to do the thing I hate...and how, at times, I don't even hate it nearly enough...the Lord has consistently assured me that this is part of the plan. What He set in motion in July of 2004, He is continuing...in and through (and to my mind, despite) my weakness and failures and even blatant sin.

That doesn't make sense to me, no matter how often He says it and reminds me of this truth. I do not say this to excuse a cavalier attitude towards the calling the Lord has placed on my life or because I want to ascribe to the position that grace is a license to sin. My knee-jerk reaction is to condemn myself...the Lord's is to comfort and encourage. I would attempt to spur myself on with emotional floggings - He chooses love...unimaginable, unfailing, always forgiving love.

In her comment to my previous post, BayouMaMa wrote: "Sounds like you and the Lord are going on a "honeymoon." She was right. Despite the instances of weakness and sin, my time with the Lord (even in contrition) was sweet and copious. He spoke so much and showed me so much, I knew I was being primed and that I had been fully prepared for all He showed me. And it was this speaking, the consistency of the message, and how everything I read and prayed fit together so perfectly that confirmed what He has been saying all along...

Right now, I can only hear what He has to communicate by falling on my face. He has chosen to allow me to struggle, that I might stay on my face a while longer. Yet still, no matter how many times I fall, I press on...hoping that next time instead of falling, I will stand. That all He is speaking will have its full effect and I will be changed and be made more holy, more righteous, more like Christ than I was before.