Romans 12:1-2
1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Doug and I have really been working at developing rhythms of rest in our daily, weekly, monthly and annual approach to life. Asking ourselves when we rest and creating space to hear from God on a regular basis. This is a major change from the way we've been living the last few years and is requiring a high degree of intentionality, but is also probably yeilding more fruit and a greater sense of connectedness to God than either of us has felt in some time.
And it's little things. Weekly it means that we take an actual day off when we don't do house work or professional work. Doug doesn't mow the lawn or check email. I'll check out. Daily it means Doug goes to the gym in the morning while Avery and I are sleeping and reads/prays through the Book of Common Prayer, inviting God to walk with him through the day. For me it means I consecrate the time I spend nursing her in the morning as a time to be silent before God, pray for my daughter and for the day and read through scripture (all things that have historically very difficult for me). But I'm trying to take the daily time spent with her every morning and orient around God as Paul instructs in Romans.
The verse says that we'll be changed from the inside out if we do this. Ironically it struck me that I'm doing these outward things and hoping for inward change. Maybe it doesn't work that way. But I'm trying. And I have to believe God will honor that.
Yesterday I didn't have a lot of time to post, but I wanted to write something, so I uploaded the lyrics to Your Love is Strong. Doug asked me why I chose to post those lyrics. Why that song moves me as much as it does (after all - it's really just an elegant retelling of the Lord's Prayer.) I thought about that today - why those words have such power. And one part in particular rose to my mind:
Two things you told me
That you are strong
And you love me
Your love is strong
So often I feel unsure, but I have hope. I don't know if these things I'm doing will make a difference, but I hope. I don't know if I'll be able to be the parent or the wife I want to be, but I have hope. I don't know if I'll always be this way, but I have hope. I think that song gives me confidence in God's strength and his ability to be strong and perfect, while I am weak and weary.
I will disappoint myself, my husband, my daughter, my friends. But He will not. His love is strong.
