My Spiritual Journey

Its 10:20pm on a Tuesday night and I’m just now sitting down to write this. The week is already busy, and it just started! I think if I’m not careful, the summer will be over before I’ve slowed down enough to enjoy it.

Luckily, Brent currently has the only working car with an air conditioner at meetings out of town and won’t return until late tomorrow so tomorrow the kids and I will be forced to stay home and just be. I’m looking forward to just playing with them. And catching up on cleaning and laundry of course =)

As for what God and I have been discussing this week…I’ve been meditating on Mark 11 and the passage about the fig tree. Jesus cursed the fig tree because it was not producing fruit and then as he was explaining to the disciples about the fig tree he states,

• Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. 24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received  it, and it will be yours. 25 And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

So two things have been consuming my thoughts this week.

1. Producing spiritual fruit must directly relate to your faith.  If I truly have faith, I could move mountains and therefore fruit would be produced in my life.
2. If I want to produce fruit and move mountains, I must be willing to continually forgive those around me.  Completely forgive not just partially forgive with lots of excuses about why I’m right and they really don’t truly understand what they did wrong type forgiveness.

Because forgiveness seems directly related to the amount of fruit God is able to produce in my life, I have spent a lot of time with Jesus talking through things that I have thought that I had forgiven but had not truly forgiven.  Complete forgiveness seems to be the theme this week.  Good stuff!

Goals:

• Still reading the same books.  The disciples are fascinating!  So is their background and the various personalities that Jesus put together and how he used them.  Also started reading The Green Letters: Principles of Spiritual Growth by Miles J. Stanford.   My neighbor gave it to me and it seems to be a great read.  I think I’ll learn tons from it.  My kind of reading =)
• Ran this morning and plan on running outside again on Thursday.  With Brent traveling so much lately, my workouts have really suffered.  I’m going to go back to good old workouts on video at the house this week to try to up the number of workouts I’m getting in a week.
• Think I’m going to have to cut back on the TV time again.  Its crazy how slowly it creeps back into taking up so much time.  I’m back into just turning it on after the kids are in bed at night instead of intentionally picking 1 thing to watch and using the rest of my time to do productive or relaxing things.
• And this one is more of a long term thing but I want to learn to sew.  Any good teachers out there =)  My aunt taught me a while ago, but I can’t remember anything.  I hand stitched a little diaper carrier thing this week and decided that I wanted to teach myself how to really sew.  I need to learn a new skill =)  We’ll see how it goes!