reminder

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13)

God help me love in this way, for I so dearly want to, and I feel like I have failed so terribly in this far too often. Please forgive my failures and heal the wounds that they have caused. Help me remember that Your grace is sufficient for me, and also for the gaps of my failures. Fill them with Your sufficient grace yet again.

Thanks for the reminder, Beth.

"I don't want to hurt the ones who matter to me."

"Doing nothing sometimes hurts worse than doing something. Life doesn't come with a guarantee..."

heck of a lesson.

The heart is a wild and unruly thing...only One can coax its spirit into the channels where it will find its truest strength and wildest freedom.


"He is not a tame lion, after all."

Even eHarmony has made me feel like a failure. Why is it that when I try to do the best thing for everybody, somebody always still ends up getting hurt? And I feel like the culprit every time. Why does my wisdom fail me?

Why do my emotions always manage to twist me up into knotted tangles? What was the point of giving us such an unruly characteristic? I feel like the ony way to protect everyone from being lashed by the whirling strands of my emotional cyclone is to stay away from absolutely everyone. But then, they end up getting hurt because I push them away instead, and then I'm alone.

What have I done? Will I ever reach a place of being able to do the right thing and not hurt anyone?

leadership & submission

"George MacDonald points out that the strong-willed one is not the willful one. A willful child wants only his own way. His will has never been exercised against himself. The strong-willed person wills against himself, chooses that which he does not naturally choose, refuses that which he would naturally choose. Many men protest that it is not their nature to dominate. Many see their wives as superior to them in intelligence, strength of character, physical endurance, or spiritual perception, and use this as an excuse to let them lead. But the roles are not assigned on the basis of capability. They were determined at the beginning of Creation to be a man's role and a woman's role...

It takes self-discipline and it takes humility to do your job. We can count on the God who issued the order to provide the strength to carry it out. No man has sufficient strength in himself properly to be the head of his wife. No woman can rightly submit to his headship. It takes grace, and grace is a gift, but we are to use the means of grace. Self-discipline helps. Prayer helps. Christ, who is the Head of all of us, stands ready to help any man or woman who asks Him."

~Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be A Woman


"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing." ~1 Cor 1.18