Raising Ebeneezers

I am poured out like water,

and all my bones are out of joint;

my heart is like wax;

it is melted within my breast;

Psalm 22:14

Have you ever gone through a season in your life that downright sucks? I have and I'm going through it now. I have definitely been struggling with some spiritual warfare. This has played itself out internally and also externally into my relationship with my husband. I must admit that during this time, I have not always looked to God for comfort and strength when I should have, in fact I have been pointedly having short conversations with no depth with Him because I honestly have no idea what to say. I have been spending most of my time trying to find my own way out of this hole I dug for myself feeling spiritually dry and abandoned.

Yet, while I have been ignoring God, he has been speaking to me so loudly that I can no longer ignore what He is trying to tell me. In my women's bible study, we have been going through 1 Samuel. A few weeks ago we were in chapter 7 where Samuel places a stone of help or Ebeneezer as a monument to what God has done for His people. Similarly, last week at church, we discussed the life of Joshua, particularly chapter 4 of the Book of Joshua in which the Lord commanded him to have the men take and make a tribute of the 12 stones in the middle of the Jordan river where it had been cut off so that they could flee.

And he said to the people of Israel, “When your children ask their fathers in times to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.” Joshua 4:21-24

Over the past few days, the idea of monuments to God's faithfulness have stuck in my head. I am so forgetful that in the valleys of my life, I forget to revisit the gifts that have been given to me by God when in fact I should not only be revisiting them, but sharing them with others to declare God's love and faithfulness. So the past few days I have been coming up with a few memorials of my own and here they are:

I met my husband when we both were not Christians,  when he left for Ranger School, we were still not Christians, God used the next 6 months of separation to place people who spoke Truth into our lives and lead us both to Christ separately, yet simultaneously. One of my sweetest memories is the first time we prayed together, I had tears streaming down my face.

When I was at my lowest and extremely critical and cynical, God placed a community of Christians who loved me despite my unbelief and who spoke and continue to speak boldly to me about my need for Jesus

A week before our wedding celebration, Brendan and I made the decision to get baptized. He was baptized first and then as the leader of our Christ-centered family, baptized me.

After moving to Fayetteville and leaving out church family in Georgia behind, we wondered if we would ever find a church as special as Crosspointe. It just so happened that the first church we visited in North Carolina has become our home and family. It's filled with other followers of Christ who encourage us and spur on our pursuit of the Gospel.

I need to point out that all of these amazing testaments to God's love for me have happened within the past year, yet somehow along the way I forgot about them. I am going to make it a point to continue to place memorials of God's faithfulness in places that I can go when I am feeling empty, and encourage you to do the same!

Amazing Grace

So, wedding and moving planning are chugging along here with less than 2 weeks to go for both. Life has been pretty busy and stressful. I'm in my last week of work and trying to iron out as many details for our transitions as I can. Brendan is in his last week of Airborne School which means that he is learning to jump out of planes and will jump out of a plane 5 times this week... what a great thing to do 2 weeks before you get married! He leaves at about 3:00am and returns between 6 and 9 pm. On an average day, we are able to spend around 1 hour together because of Brendan's sleep schedule... which means that during that time I am most likely harassing him about the wedding or our move.

Something that's more important that all of those little things we have going on in our lives is that last weekend Brendan and I  got baptized at our church! We were both christened as infants in our childhood churches, but feel that we are called to be baptized as believers in the Gospel, which we weren't capable of being when we were infants. At the church we go to during a Baptism Sunday, a friend will read your testimony of God's grace in your life to the congregation and then you are fully immersed in water. Water baptism illustrates Jesus' death, burial and resurrection as well as the death of  our old sinful lives and of being raised to walk in newness of life in Christ. The submerged body represents death and burial and the body being raised up out of the water provides a picture of resurrection and new life.

While baptism does not "save" you, it is a public proclamation of your faith in Jesus and admission of your need for God's grace in your life.

     What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
    For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
    Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. Romans 6:1-14 ESV

 If God can forgive us, we then are called to forgive others

 I feel like it's important for me to be honest and say that doing life together again has had its challenges, and especially the last few weeks, we have needed to give each other grace. When two people come together, their own selfish wants sometimes get in the way and cause them to butt heads... add in the stress of what my Army friends and I call "reintegration" after periods of separation, wedding planning, and moving? Well you have yourself an equation for stress, and sometimes people's feelings get hurt.

There is a song that we sing in church called "Come Ye Sinners" and one of the lyrics says: "If you tarry until you're better you will never come at all." I've always liked that part of the song, it's encouraging to know that you cannot wait until you've "cleaned yourself up" to come to Christ and that no matter how battered and broken you are if you repent and believe, He will save you. Okay, its much more than encouraging. It's amazing.

I've always had a tough time forgiving people without holding onto some lingering grudge, but as I continue on my journey with the Lord, I realize how badly I need to begin forgiving and asking for forgiveness. God doesn't wait for us to make things right to give us grace, so if the Creator of the universe can forgive us without waiting for us to clean ourselves up, why do we constantly wait for apologies from the people we love? Christ has taught us that He is love and that through His love for us by His work on the cross, all our sins are forgiven... if that is the case for us with God, how can we not make it the case in our own lives with people that we love and forgive them even when they don't ask for it? How can we expect God to forgive us from turning away from Him, when we can't even forgive people for the minor things in life?

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. James 1:19-20 ESV