November 20, 2005

So my greatest fear as a Christian is losing touch with God again. I don't mean in any way spite or turning my back, I mean simply falling back into the world again. It's happened to me so many times before, and I'm willing to fight to keep it from happening again. I feel like this time around God wants me to be honest, so there it is.

I think that complacency is a huge topic that is never discusses in church, that is winning over Christians by the thousands each day. We somehow get the idea that it IS possible to love God and money, or that we can live our lives however we want until Sunday, when we realize what we've done, only to restart it the next day. I reached a point where I was finally able to see God so much, and I know that the devil and the world are trying very hard to pull me back in to it and the ways I saw and knew before. The truth is, in some points in time, they succeed.

I think the thing that God is showing me throughout all of this is that staying on complete fire one hundred percent of the time isn't a reality, but keeping Him alive in my heart and keeping the flame alive is a neccessity in this life. I think He is teaching me how to deal with the way the world works, and to do it on His terms, not mine. To find happiness with God, is I think, more important than me being completely on fire all the time. He's showing me it's ok to feel normal and still feel Him in me and around me.

Tonight, I was with some friends that I would do about anything for, and I realized that as I was just sitting with one of them, talking, catching up on life, that God was sitting there with us, and He must've been smiling, because I couldn't help but smile too. Thanksgiving at church was probably the most I've seen everyone happy in quite a long time. For maybe the first time ever, I truly saw how thankful I could be to see everyone together, and just loving the company of each other, through God. Perhaps He's spending some time showing me the subtle things, or maybe it's just me, but I'm starting to see the way He moves in the underlying places in life, and it amazes me as much as the big miracles.

Though it's not hard to love the people we get along with in life, how much do we show love to the people that sometimes grate our nerves? If a person annoys us or bugs us, do we try to show them God's love, or do we simply try our best to ignore them? Is our heart in the right place here, and following the example we were given in love, or do we take the convenient path through the forest?