"arms high and heart abandoned"

Tonight God really challenged me.  I was at Tehillah and we were singing The Stand, a song I have song a million times.  The bridge of the song says "I stand with arms high and heart abandoned," and I was standing there singing with my arms high, but God spoke to me and said, "is your heart really abandoned to me?"  It might seem like a straightforward question but it rocked me tonight.   It got me thinking about what it means to have an abandoned heart.  I have so many things in my life that I have not yet surrendered to God and if I want to follow him with my whole heart then that means giving him my whole heart.  God was really humbling me and amidst it all I began to feel discouraged.  As I looked at myself, suddenly all I could see was all the things I need to fix in my life and I was a little overwhelmed. But then God moved in me even more.  While going over all of the things I need to do, I realized that it is much too much for me to do on my own strength, but instead of continuing to feel discouraged I began to just feel overwhelmed by God's love and his encouragement.  He began speaking to my heart and telling me that His strength is and always will be enough, and that by his strength I can do anything.  I left the service tonight feeling so fired up and ready to just live by his Spirit and do stuff for God, I feel limitless.  Not sure why I decided to blog this lol.  But tonight was really really good. God is so great :)

Defending the brightness of the broad-day sun

"If great paintings could talk, and they saw you walking through the gallery staring at the floor, they would cry out, 'Look! Look at me.  I am the reason you are here.'  And when you look and exult in the beauty of the paintings with those around you, your joy would be full.  You would not complain that the paintings should have kept quiet.  They rescued you from wasting your visit."

-John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

Send Me

Three weeks off has been so great but I am actually pretty excited to get back to school.  Not really looking forward to the stress but I anticipate that God has a ton of amazing stuff in store for this semester.  I am so thankful that I can go into this semester without worry, trusting that His plans for me are perfect and as long as I am in His will things will work out.  Its so easy to get caught up in making big decisions about the future but tonight I am reminded that worrying never helped anyone, and that He has things under control.

God has a perfect and specific plan for each one of our lives, and he wants so badly for us to recognize that and surrender our plans to Him.  He loves us so much, and He wants the best life possible for us.


Jesus, I choose to follow you because you deserve so much more than I could ever give, and yet my heart is what you desire.  How could I not surrender it to you? I know that your plans for my life are so much better than any that I could ever imagine.  I pray that I will always remember that and follow you wherever you lead me.  Thank you for your sacrifice.

Tonight I am especially thankful for grace.

  Lately I have found myself getting easily discouraged when I fall short, but after listening to a sermon tonight I am reminded of Romans 3:23 which says that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”  This isn’t an excuse to stop trying to live pure lives, but it is humbling and relieving to remember that we aren’t expected to be perfect.  If it were even possible for us to be, we wouldn’t need God would we?  

What is important is that when we do fall short, which we all will, we still repent and continue to seek after God.  He will continue to forgive.  Sometimes its hard to believe that God will keep forgiving every time we mess things up, but its not like we deserved forgiveness any more before doing whatever it is that we did that particular time.  We aren’t forgiven because we deserve it, and Jesus didn’t die for us because we deserve it. We don’t deserve it, and there is nothing that we can do in this live that will make us deserving of it.  So instead of beating ourselves up about not being good enough or screwing up all the time, maybe we should just let ourselves be in awe of the one who created the world and yet loves us enough that he died for us, and allow ourselves to fall more in love with him.  When we allow that to happen, our perspectives will change, our actions will change, and our lives will change, whether we realize it is happening or not.