Someone finally did it!

I was pretty skeptical when a colleague mentioned, "here's a great video on poverty".  I feel like all of those videos raising awareness about any sort of societal issue are the same...shocking pictures, emotional music, and at the end I'm left feeling guilty or heartless.
This involves none of those elements.  After I watched it I just wanted to stand up and cheer.  It is like getting a halftime locker room talk from a coach and finding out for the first time that we actually have a good chance of winning the game.
So take a coffee break, sit back and be encouraged.  And be careful with your coffee in case you start excitedly swinging your arm around in a cheering gesture.

 

Heart Surgery

Recent months are some of the more painful in my short-ish life.  It wasn't one particular circumstance, more like back to back to back to back to back situations where the floor seemed to drop out from beneath me. 

It's the sort of season that will rock a girl to the core and leave her with just the core, which is probably the whole point of it all to begin with. I liken it to heart surgery.  Not my physical heart.  I mean heart as in the center of who I am. 

There's a passage in the book of Hebrews that I really love.  The first part of it goes like this:  

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,"  -Hebrews 12:1 (ESV, emphasis mine)

I feel like in this season God mercifully lifted weights from me to help me press even harder into this race of life before me.  The weights He lifted weren't inherently bad things at all:  dreams, goals, relationships, even financial security.  Having those things lifted (which felt like having them taken away at the time) hurt like crazy. 

It didn't take long before God clued me in to what He was doing.  Then I saw the tender mercy in the action of Him lifting the weights that I couldn't see or simply wasn't strong enough to lay aside on my own.  And it still hurt like crazy, just to be authentic with  you.  But I had the sweet comfort of His care and nearness in it all.

I learned that each weight He lifted from me had deep roots in my heart.  But the weights weren't taken from me recklessly like weeds from a garden with all the ripping and tearing. Instead they were skillfully removed with great precision by the very Surgeon who created my heart.

Surgery hurts, but the purposeful wounds of a surgeon can be trusted.  We willingly submit ourselves to it because we know that it will help us, right? 

So that's where I've been for the past couple of months -- letting God do a bit of radical heart surgery and trying not to get in His way during the healing process.