Wow…today has been a whirlwind. It’s dessert day and I have
to have Butterfinger on top of meal plan, did peanut butter at lunch, and am
going to do plain bagel instead of healthier wheat. Well I figured with all
these plans surely God would make my
weight be down this morning despite constipation, late night eating, and high sodium
day yesterday. Well…I was wrong…wt shot up to yet again and I went into
tailspin. Actually, at first I was fine because trusted in God…then started
asking other people to justify how I felt….and that’s when got out of control
and started to feel uneasy again and stopped trusting was fluctuation. This
tailspin continued until I sat down to bible study.
Now first let me just say that I was going to do this video
yesterday, but through a bunch of (not so random) circumstances I wasn’t able
to. God’s perfect timing was for me to do it today…and it was perfect.
Strangely He also has provided perfect hunger for me today…bowel movements…and
now peace. So here is the study.
Do your Part, not God’s
That’s the biggest take away I got today, was that I am
still trying to play God just in the pure fact that I act so much out of fear.
You see, this video was centered around Exodus 14:12-14
12 Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the
Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die
in the desert!”
13 Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lordwill bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never
see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be
still.”
You see the
Egyptians had just the previous week seen 10 miracles God performed to rescue
them from the Egyptians, but now at the Red Sea, they doubt and complain. They
see the impossible and don’t see anyway out. They see that God isn’t going to
take them on their easy path and refuse to let God be God in how He wants to
govern their lives because its not how they think it should be. Exactly as I
was today. I was mad at God and telling
Him how things should go…that things would be better had He just let my weight
be down. How dare I! How dare I tell the God of the universe how my life
should go when only He knows how it should go.
Luckily Moses
points out the 4 things we should do in this time…and I have a little
reflection here on each, because each were so powerful and not at all what I
was doing.
- Be Fearless: our natural tendency is to react to this circumstances in fear…that’s how I always eact to weight jumping up and Moses knew that, that’s why first step is to be fearless and instead use the Spirit’s strength to get us through. The fear it denotes is one that paralyzes, but (even more fitting for me) one of intellectual anticipation of evil…getting us stuck in our “What ifs”. This is how I always react.What if it goes up tomorrow? What if I never need meal plan increase? On and on…and instead of being fearless I feed the fear and get sucked in. Now, though I am equipped with these verses to allow me to be fearless.
a.
Phill 4:6-7 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every
situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to
God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard
your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
I should exchange fear for the opportunity to pray. Instead of trying to use my
mind which brought the fear to combat the fear, I should pray and use the
Spirit to be fearless.
b.
Psalm 145:17-18 The Lord is righteous in
everything he does; he is filled with
kindness.18 The Lord is close to all who call on him, yes, to all who call on
him in truth. I’m always scared that the
Lord doesn’t protect me or is out there to test me or to make me face challenge
after challenge. But the Lord is kind and He does all out of love. I need just
trust this nature of God.
Besides
this is the same God of yesterday…literally yesterday when my weight was down.
Or the times in the past all has been okay. That is the same God now. He does
care, does love, and is there for me. I need not have the answers, just the
faith to pray instead of fearing.
- Be still: this command comes in the verse that says stand firm. This denotes standing and stillness. tanding requires engaging our mind, will, and body to stand BESIDE God, not in His place. We can tell we are trying to be God when we get stressed or try and manipulate things. But if we only stand…knowing He is God…knowing there is Someone out there with the ultimate control then we could relax and JUST DO OUR PART. The other part of this is being still…we can’t see God if we aren’t standing still….if we keep moving everything is a blur. I definintely need to practice this stillness, and honestly if I am fearless it will definitely be easy because my mind won’t be running around, but instead can be focused. Oh, and a good verse reminder.
a.
Ps 46:10 “Be
still and know that I am God…” It is only in stillness we can realize that God
is God
- Be watchful: this requires the standing and stillness because it means looking for where God is showing imself today…not just focusing on the next season we are moving to. If we keep looking for the next season, or what happened in the past, or where we are going in the future…we miss out on all the miracles God is performing today. It allows us to see the details and beauty of the day. We don’t have to have the enemy, season, or war to end to see this..we just need to be fearless, be still, and be watchful. To practice this we take a PURPOSEFUL PAUSE in the day and ask God to make us AWARE of how He is showing Himself. Not to make Him show Himself, but to make us aware. God is always moving, we just aren’t looking out to see it.
- Be quiet: This takes training, because as people we tend to look at these circumstances as problems…and we start to open our mouths and complain to God. Yet there are no problems, just situations God can easily handle. One big thing she said here is that we (as the Israelites) trusted God with our deliverance and need to trust Him with our circumstance and destiny. It’s so easy for me to trust that God is delivering me from ED, yet I don’t trust Him in the steps along the way. Instead I complain and tell Him how things should go, but that’s not trust….it’s me trying to play God. I need to be quiet and trust.
So tonight I am
at peace…and honestly it’s because I stopped the begging, pleading, and
complaining. I decided to be fearless knowing God is providing just as He said
He would. I am choosing to be still…to stop running down every path of what I
should eat, how tomorrow should go, and just stand in the moment and the
Spirit. I am choosing to be watchful and I am seeing how God is providing today…hunger
despite close eating, peace even when about to eat freedom food, the God
incidence that led me to this video, and
the time to write this entry…all are miracles from God. And I am being quiet…ceasing
and repenting of the complaining that occupied so much of my time today. This
is going to take practice…but I hope to continue to use this, not just on this
journey, but wherever God leads.
And He lead me from first to last bite to eat my 1st butterfinger since was 12
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