Thursday, September 20, 2007

Moving On From the Chair....

Sorry I've been a sporadic blogger lately. I'm sure all two of you missed me. =) All of those September commitments I had talked about have been upon us the last couple of weeks. We made a super quick trip into Bartlesville last week and had a great time with family there, although it was really too short. But the next two times we'll be there - Thanksgiving and New Years - will give us longer than a day and a half, so that will be good. Other than that, our new community group started last night, and I am really excited to see what God is going to do in that group. It's a really fun group of couples!

And the Bible study class I've been leading (Calm My Anxious Heart) started last week. I've been wanting to blog about it. We've met two times, and I feel like the Lord is just doing His thing...showing up, giving wisdom, creating community. I've really felt His presence in my preparation time as well as during the class, and I'm excited to see all of the healing God will bring about in so many women's hearts who are willing to journey with Him all the way to contentment and trust. Today's class was our first day of real discussion since this past week was the first week to have done reading and homework, and already there was one lady who experienced a HUGE breakthrough with trusting the Lord this week. As it always does, it involved brokenness, but once she was in that place of really and fully giving up her plans or "control" and just obeying God despite how she felt about her circumstance, peace overwhelmed her. It took just a couple of days of surrendering, and she began to FEEL it. She is experiencing amazing calm and contentment over something she has struggled with for SO long. I had an experience like that this past week too....when intense anxiousness hit, the Lord brought me to a place of surrender....again (sometimes it's necessary for me to make it a repeat practice), and within a day, I felt completely at ease, resting in God's sovereignty and ok with it if He chose to do things differently than what I want. It's a good place to be. Restful. Peaceful. I'm so encouraged that God is doing something big in our class.

So we talked about how amazing it is how we can wrestle over something for so long, holding on to something we know God wants us to release to Him, and once we actually really are broken enough to surrender to Him and obey, His peace comes so quickly!!! He loves to give that peace! But even though that's true, we still tend to resist brokenness. So my favorite part of our class discussion today was about this. We talked about why it is that we resist getting to that place of brokenness/surrender. What are the real heart issues involved? Heart issues are the only thing really worth addressing, since the heart is what God looks at and is where true transformation takes place. Some of the possible heart issues shared were pride, humility, wanting to play "victim"/enjoying our "pity parties", selfishness, wrong focus - just thinking that this life is about me and my happiness, envy, wanting control. It was so neat because I know the Holy Spirit led us into that discussion. I hadn't planned it at all. I love it when He does that! He knew that I needed to dig deeper into the root causes of my refusal to trust Him completely, and I found some surprising things. But He's working on me in those areas, and I want to cooperate. I know that God is teaching me so much and challenging me during this Bible study, and I'm loving it. Even though it is hard. Really hard at times. The whole notion of surrender completely goes against our nature, but it is the crux of the call to follow Christ, and I know God cares so much about me getting to the place of surrender and living there. He cares enough to say a lot about it and gently guide me there. I'm just glad there are others journeying through it too! What a gift.

3 comments:

Angel said...

your bible study sounds awsome.

Unknown said...

The B'ville girls group is looking for a new study and someone suggested 'Calm my Anxious Heart' - sounds like you would recommend it??? what is the format of the study? would you be willing to email me some of the details?

Thanks!!!

FordeFam said...

Ohhhh! I think I'm going to look into that study! Linda Dillow is great! I have her Creative Counterpart book, although I still have a lot to read! :)
Maia