Encouragement for the Day

05 Thursday Sep 2013

Tags

Sometimes a little encouragement is good enough for the moment. I’ve had a few good friends encourage me with just a nugget that gets me through the next few steps. I got this text message from a friend who I was sharing my journey with. Good stuff.

Heres some encouragement… wanna be a friend of Jesus?

My basic prayer for the last the 20 years has been that God would grant me the honor of becoming a best friend of His Son. I had forgotten that Jesus had sent his original best friend, the Apostle John, to live in a cave on the Island of Patmos.

He exiled John to a lonely cave in his old age. And then Jesus came to John in the cave and gave him the revelation that has given all his little ones faith and courage to fight the good fight for the last two thousand years. One day Jesus will come back and make all the wrong things right, and for a few years of temporal faithfulness Jesus will give us an eternal reward so great that it can’t be described or imagined with our present earthbound language. That’s what John saw in the cave.

And now I think that Jesus sends all his best friends into a cave for some period of their lives. Maybe more than once.

And the cave is where they learn that the pain of this life, no matter how severe or complicated or unfair, is ultimately an invitation to the party we’ve all been looking for down here, but have never found. So today, I’m trying to fight the good and great fight by looking forward to the party that will never end.

Grace and peace.

Breakfast and Revelation

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by Seeking Peace in Faith, Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

encouragement, God's ways, revelation, truth

I had breakfast with a friend who said something to me that I thought was profound. I was sharing my struggles with him and he said, “I’m not here today to offer encouragement. It really doesn’t help does it? I’m here today hoping I offer you a word of revelation.” Wow!

He was so on target. Revelation gives me something to chew on. Revelation doesn’t tell me that today will be a good day, it tells me there are things bigger than me to consider. Revelation engages my mind and makes me explore. I have plenty of people offering me encouragement and, honestly, I appreciate it but it isn’t helping. The longer I go without employment, the worse I feel and the shorter amount of time the encouragement helps.

I feel abandoned by God right now. I feel isolated and alone. Unused and thrown away. Encouragement lifts me up for a brief time and then the fall back to the bottom comes and hurts worse. Revelation challenges me to explore, to read, to seek God and ask why I feel this way, and, if it’s real or imagined.

I had a talk with God today. I told him how I was feeling. I pleaded with him to reveal his ways to me. I don’t feel encouraged. I don’t feel brighter about the future. I don’t think things are going to be OK. But I talked to God and that’s a start to something. It’s a start because for the last two weeks I haven’t felt like communicating with God. I’ve been in relationships where communication was poor. It’s easy for me to isolate and not talk but that doesn’t really resolve anything, does it? So today, I talked. I opened up and communicated. I talked to God because a friend reminded me the importance of revelation. And it reminded me of this…

Third Day’s Revelation – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u0P9kwfF4s (It’s 5 minutes long and you have to endure a commercial)

Grace and peace.