Hello all!

This week’s entry will be pretty short, as I rush to prepare for the work of this weekend. It’s going to be a special time for me, and something I’ve always wanted to do. Though I’ve done missionary work, and gone to retreats, I have never had a time where I just went somewhere with God, for the specific purpose of just being with Him. I have weekends away with my husband sometimes, and I’ve gotten away with good friends. But I’ve never gotten away for a weekend with just Jesus. And why not? He’s real, He speaks, He’s so awesome to be around… When someone asks me about my plans for the weekend, I find it so hard to explain. How do you make someone understand that you’ve gone to spend time with someone they can’t see? But I know He’s real. It’s like a marriage to me; it takes upkeep, it takes time alone together. It’s romantic in a way words fail me to explain. But I ask for everyone’s prayers. No matter how many times I meet with God, there’s a part of me always scared to death to get close to Him, and it takes a lot to get past that. It has taken many, many hours of many weeks of many years of reassurance from God to learn that it is safe to go up and eat from His hand, the way a wild animal can ultimately be tamed by the hand of a kind person. When I give my heart to God, and we really connect, sometimes my heart feels like a raw egg broken open, running every way; yet, somehow, God keeps it all from leaving His hands, sorting it gently, putting it back together. There are parts of my soul – once many, now few, that resent His tampering, and it takes all that’s in me to bring these parts out of the shadows and into the light of His presence, to let Him deal with them. When I try to explain it in words, it sounds like God is being cruel, taking sore wounds that are healing incorrectly and ripping them back open so they can heal without infection. But there’s freedom in His touch, and a healing in His Presence; I could almost stay there forever, and someday I will. For now, I’ll cherish the brief glimpses of His love for me and the few unbroken times we are together.

God bless you, and have a good weekend.

SCRIPTURES:
John 3:20-21a, Mark 6:46-47, Luke 6:12, Matthew 14:23, Matthew 14:13, Matthew 11:28-30, Phil 4:6-7 (For those without a Bible, I recommend the free Bibles on Biblegateway.com [not affiliated with this site].)