Grace for Grace

 There is rest in the middle of tension, peace in the middle of grief.  We have been given the Holy Spirit, the Comforter!!! Maybe I wasn't meant to focus on that as intently as I do, but I have felt the gift of the Comforter over and over in my life. Honestly it's an eerie thing, that kind of rest and peace, because when I know that I should be agitated or freaking out or stressed, that peace is so steady, and it feels a little crazy.  There is a peace that comes from walking with the Holy Spirit. In John, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will be sent to teach us all things and that He will leave Him for us. And then the next verse says that Jesus is giving us Peace. Since peace is a fruit of the Spirit, I believe that Jesus was referencing walking with the Holy Spirit. Peace that passes all understanding, that fills us even when we are in unrest. That peace, the Comforter, comes and untangles the knots.  It never comes when you would expect. I've dropped mugs of cof...

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." This year I felt the concept of wholeheartedness being more important. At the beginning of the year, I didn't super know what that meant, thought I could feel that part of it was every single piece of who I am and what I do being aligned with God. It was a vague feeling, so it wasn't super helpful, but I trusted that the Holy Spirit would bring more understanding as it was needed. We were made to be whole, not fragmented, not splintered so that parts of ourselves are at war with other parts. Sin does that, it pits parts of ourselves against each other. In the Psalms, David talks about his soul being damaged by sin, praying that God would repair his insides because sin had wrecked them. That doesn't mean that wholeheartedness looks like perfection, but it looks like total pursuit of what God values, even when we mess up: reconciliation with no shame, accepting ...

"A father of the fatherless," "God setteth the solitary in families:" Family was the original design for everything. Family is literally what this all has been about: closeness, connection, love. Being so deeply entrenched in the Trinity. Us in Him and Him in us. I don't think that we're supposed to become the 4th member of the Trinity or anything, but surrounded by the Trinity, walking in harmony and constant connection. Jesus became human so that we could see a perfect model of the Christian walk. He said that He didn't do anything apart from His father. When did we lose how we interact with each other? The family of Christ, the Body of Christ, has become such a polarized and separated people. It looks normal because it's what I'm used to, but if I stop to really think about it, it is so sad and so out of balance.  We look at other Christians as "other" instead of "brother". Humanity's origin was "Let's make som...

I had a dream a while back, and in the dream I carried my Bible with me everywhere, and there were people trying to take it from me, I don't remember all the details, but what I do remember so clearly is the feeling of urgency and conviction when I said "If I lose it, I will die." And in the dream that was literal, if I lost the Bible, I knew I would die right there, but it has become a connection that I believe to be true. I know that if I set down my Bible, I'm not going to keel over, but I also know that the Word is my hope, my way of knowing God, and seeing that He is who He says He is. Those words are life everlasting, and if I lose them, I will die. The Bible is not some dusty religious text, it is a living, preserved, and 100% accurate letter from God to His children so that they would know Him, and they would know that what He says is TRUTH. It is literally the words of God, the words of Jesus, and we get to read them and live our lives according to them. It...