Part of the Learning

Not much has made so huge an impression in my life as Mexico. Mexico this, Mexico that, I feel sort of silly telling those who weren't there about the revelations I had. But it plucked a heartstring, and God continued to teach me through the summer and show me more about Himself, over and over.

But somehow I find myself fighting for it.

During the summer, it was easier for me to focus on positives, friends were home from college, and the expectation of the big SENIOR YEAR was a novelty. July became August, and August turned September, and October eventually rolled around. To graduate, I only needed three credits, but took five anyway. Then the negativity sets in, when I wake up and realize that this is life, and I have to do homework, get up at an ungodly hour, work for more hours at my job, and try to balance a social life when I'm not buried in a text book. Add in the arguments over college and ACT's, a severe spiritual drought, and some unencouraging and negative comments directed at me, and there I was. I felt like a plant set in a windowsill, but no one came to water me, and the sun was scorching.

I'm still fighting. I am a daughter of the King, and His joy is my joy. Or so it should be, I fall on the pessimistic side of things generally.

Yet though I get frustrated, I feel dry, I have faith. I believe in the Lord's presence, even when I don't "feel" Him there. That is all. He is the reason for my life and the God of my heart, and I need to bow down in humility, because I can't make it alone.

The Lord is so good, even as I sit here, flipping through to find some other passage, He gave me one... the only red text on the page, which is what caught my eye.

"Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'"-2 Cor. 12:8,9

Lord,
You are my God, my rock, the guardian of my soul. Please take every thought I have and make it obedient to you, help me be positive when nothing would make me want to be, except that I remember that is what you would want of me.

It is a struggle I'm going through, I do not have this perfected, I cannot say that I've reached the other side. But this is the sanctifying process. I thank the Lord that He is loving and patient and guiding, for I would be dead without Him.

I want to dance, like I did in Mexico, to let the whole world fall away except that I am holding the hands of my brothers and sisters and proclaiming my Lord, from every corner, in every language. There are no boundaries in Christ, and one day I hope to hold that little brown hand again, whether in this life or the next.

"Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in my weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." -2 Cor. 12:9,10