Off Again

First of all keep praying for my friend Amy and her husband who's in a coma after a motorcross accident. She's updating her blog daily now and seriously I can't get through a post with tears in my eyes! Go visit Ramblings of a Root to join people in prayer and see the story unfold.

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And yep, I'm off again...

Well, tomorrow, but as it approaches I'm really feeling the hours counting down quickly.

Hours to do loads of laundry.

Hours to finish writing my talk for Saturday night.

Hours to grocery shop, pack, clean, you get the idea.

Not enough hours....

I am getting excited about my talk though....and nervous. I know that if you've read my blog for awhile you would think I did this a lot but if you know me in real life you would know that I'm actually pretty quiet and have a hard time even speaking up about things in a group.

It is definitely one of those things that just gets better with practice though. I don't visibly shake anymore...at least I don't think I do.

Anyway, the theme this weekend is "For Such A Time As This" and we're using the book of Esther to show women the process of preparation, positioning and purpose. Although the three people speaking will probably talk about all of those things we're each supposed to focus on one aspect and mine is purpose.

That might sound kind of easy since all I would have to do is find my old copy of "The Purpose Driven Life" and quote random chapters, but I like to complicate things:)

I don't even remember the Purpose Driven Life but I do remember the first line...."It's not about you..." I know what the author was getting at. That we should stop figuring out our purpose with our self-centered ideas and focus on God since our lives were His plan.

But I think our purpose is somewhat about us. It's about us being reflections of the gospel of grace, or in other words our purpose is about us reflecting Jesus. That's such a simple message but one I think we take forgranted. We (I) tend to over complicate life, over intellectualize God, or just forget about it.

But when I was thinking and praying about what to share this weekend I just kept coming back to the simple message of the gospel.

My friend and I were talking and despite the fact that I'm going to be talking this weekend about love, Jesus, etc. I was kind of going off about a particular mother who has a boy in Emma's class. The mom drinks all day and I was saying how it is so sad that her son is not properly cared for.

My friend told me the story of this woman who grew up in an environment filled with drugs and abuse and then chose that for her own life as well. God brought her to a Christian organization because she was homeless and had been kicked out of the local women's shelter. Well, it's been three years and she's off the streets and graduating from the community college as a certified drug and alcohol dependency counselor. She said of the organization "They loved me until I loved myself".

Wow, that could totally be the mom I was criticizing!

And God totally did that for us!

So, a part of reflecting the gospel is remembering how exactly God loved us until we loved ourselves, or if we aren't there yet (c'mon none of us are completely there) surrendering to that process and surrendering to His love. And then we're supposed to do that for others.

Simple but hard right?

Well, I've also been learning about the fruits of the spirit and the thing about fruit is that the tree doesn't put forth effort to grow it. An apple tree produces apples because it's an apple tree. That's it...

The first fruit of the spirit is love and if we're filled with God like we're supposed to be as His children, love is going to be produced in our lives without effort.

So, that's along the lines of what I'm going to share this weekend. I get to go last so I can also add in a bunch of stuff, repeating and reiterating what the other two speakers said so that's taking a lot of my stress away about this.

If I don't get the chance to write tomorrow, be praying for me please. And have a good weekend!