There’s not enough time in my day. I wring every second out of every minute, maximizing every opportunity to schedule more. I become obsessed with time; with volume; with cutting corners to pretend I gained volume. Gradually, my calendar began stifling the Lord’s movement in my life. The activities that fill my schedule–they’re good in…
To wait quietly.
It was only recently that I understood how much of my life has been spent waiting on God. An inventory of those around me shows I am not alone in this. And I suspect at some point–if not nearly every point–in your journey, you have similarly waited on God. Nearly every person dear to me is waiting on God for something: for a door to…
What is pleasing to Him.
I’ve been grasping for that which I’m afraid to lose. I torment myself trying to protect a circumstance, relationship, opportunity, status, object, moment, season, or chapter. I manipulate, control, and influence to preserve whatever I am attempting to maintain. And somewhere along the way, I became enamored with the method instead of the mission. I suspect you can…
Good, perfect, and pleasing.
I’ve been holding so tightly to what I think is mine–my relationships, my time, my job, my resources, my life, my goals, and all the rest. I strain to maintain the status quo. I vacillate between relief that these things will remain and fear that they won’t. Of course, these things have never been mine….
In marvelous ways.
It was during my recent time of waiting on God that I realized my expectations of God had started impeding my experience of God. And my expectations of God could be described with two words: convenience and predictability. Convenience. I’ve become accustomed to the incessant convenience and stimuli present around us. I group convenience and…
Keep me free.
During many seasons of my life, I’ve found myself paralyzed by the opinions of others. When it’s not the opinions of others, it’s my mental projection of those opinions. In either case, I am trapped between the work Christ has done in me and the work Christ has yet to do because I fear what…
Beyond the bittersweet.
In every happy event, there is usually an aspect of sadness. Even the most positive circumstances can provide some fragment of pain. The happenings of life are bittersweet: one door opening means another door closing, a new chapter means the end to an old chapter, progression brings maturity, but progression brings change, and with life…
The in-between.
We spend much of our life in the in-between: in between a peak and a valley, in between birth and eternity, in between the start and the finish, in between surrendering to Christ and experiencing complete union with Christ, in between fulfilling God’s purpose for the previous chapter and knowing God’s purpose for the next…
To the full.
It is no secret that the enemy loves to distract us. By distracting us from what God has for us in this moment, the enemy can steal the joy that God has made available to us in this moment. If we obsess about the next step, we become too paralyzed to take the present step…
Paige Pippin 