To eat, or not to eat...

Recently, through a chain of circumstances not linked by me, a new aspect of an old truth about myself was hit home to me, hopefully to an ever-increasing depth.

It seems like time and again God has brought to my attention that any excellence in my life must be of God, and not of myself.

One day, in what felt like a random phone call, I was called to account for how friendly, or in this case, how "not friendly" I had greeted someone in the local Walmart. No matter what I said, I could not convince this person that I hold no ill feelings whatsoever toward the person they thought I slighted. To keep a long story short, I felt very attacked, from out of nowhere. It really rattled me.

Some days later there was an entirely different encounter that also made me really question myself and threw me into a certain degree of turmoil.

Then one afternoon, as all this was brewing on the simmer burner in my heart, I started asking God to show me what it was that He wanted me to see, 'cause I could sense there was something.

I always find it so incredible, how God can take something that feels like such a muddle, and shed such clean light on it, when I open it up to Him.

He showed me once again, how important it is to me to feel "right". Funny as it may seem, the thought that helped me see it clearly, was about Jesus walking through the cornfield on the Sabbath, and plucking the ear of corn, and eating it.

If that was me, I would have went hungry.

I know it's not violating the true Sabbath to pluck and eat the corn. But I am strong enough in myself that I would have denied myself the bite to eat, for the sake of not stumbling someone, for the sake, truly, of not having someone look cross-eyed at me for my actions.

If Christ picked and ate the corn, it was for a very good reason (besides being hungry).

My not eating the corn would actually be a mis-representation of Christ. I would be choosing self-rightness (actually self-righteousness) over the liberty in Christ that we are exhorted to STAND FAST in.

It breaks my heart, how prone I am to self-righteousness... one could walk away from that cornfield feeling superior to the others munching their ear of corn, that I had the discipline or self control to do without. What a load of garbage! In all reality, I would be the one grieving the heart of my Father! It is not a virtue, to have, but not walk in, the liberty and life that is in Christ. It is actually setting myself up as knowing better than God...and that is shades of you-know-who! God forbid!

So, I walk away from this, feeling an ever growing determination to let Christ live and move and have His being in me, to be nothing and no one in my own eyes first of all, and then to forget about the ones who might look cross-eyed at me and just concern myself with whatever He says to me. I want to completely be God's girl...not my own.

For we have this treasure in earthen vessels,

that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.

2 Cor. 4:7

I want to spend all the rest of my days discovering the joy of what it feels like to live for an audience of ONE! To stand or fall by His measurement alone...because He is so very rich in mercy!