God's Word

"For the word of God is living and active." Hebrews 4:12

The section I am in of my Devotional is "Shaped by His Word". The focus is about how to dive into scripture and how to let scripture lead your daily life. After all, scripture is God's word right? It always seems to me that whenever something is heavy on my heart, God uses scripture to set me at ease and to answer the questions on my mind. The hardest part about a heavenly Father is that as humans we need something tangible. It is hard to have a relationship with someone you can't physically see. My thought is that through prayer and just being in the Word you are in company with God. Something I struggle with is the concept that God wants a relationship with me. Who am I to deserve God's grace?

While I find that God answers my questions through scripture I know that he reaches me in other ways. Today I found solace through a book.

I am re-reading my favorite book, Blue Like Jazz, and there is a part when Donald Miller is telling a story about a conversation he had with one of his good friends who had recently gotten married. Don was asking his friend if he thought marriage was all it was cracked up to be and his friend said "It is so much more." His friend tells him that he thought that marriage would give him this feeling of being complete and whole, but it didn't. He says there is nothing wrong with his wife but "there are places in our lives that only God can go." When I first started reading the section I was annoyed but then I felt convicted. His friend explains what he meant by saying "It is so much more." He means that through loving his wife he is able to better interact with God. He says "I mean that to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love."

It's like the words jumped off the page and smacked me in the face. By loving others and allowing others to love me, to find myself lovable, I will learn how to accept who God is and be in a relationship with him. I struggle a lot with loving myself and uncertainty over how to love other people. I feel selfish because I don't feel like I have truly learned how to care about other people in the way they need. I rely a lot on acceptance from other people, but the reality I am dealing with is that I have to be accepting of myself first. I have to learn how to accept God's grace and how to accept myself. I have to find my worth in this world before I can be "loved purely and furiously" by any friend I make.

So I feel like this is my charge as I enter the "real world" post college: Learn how to accept God's grace. Learn how to accept myself. Learn how to build relationships with other people that benefit us both, not just me. Learn how to care for others. Learn humility.