A deep thought from my morning

I went out of coffee with a group of my co-workers last night to celebrate my up-coming birthday. They're so sweet. It's not something we do for every EA that works at my school....but this group of women have surrounded me these days and are making sure I feel wanted, special and loved. I love you guys too!! They shouldn't have - but 2 of them brought me gifts. I'm using them both as we speak :) Coffee, really-really good coffee from one friend and a brand new coil-bound journal from another. I was almost done my current journal but, like I told them last night - it isn't a coil-bound one and it doesn't feel right in my hands. I'd been considering just ending it and going out to buy a new one that felt right when I was holding it - there's something about the feel of The Right journal. Anyway....the last few pages of my old one will remain empty and the new one is now broken in!!

I'm reading this book right now

and wanted to share a passage of it with you because I'm re-reading this passage for the 3rd morning in a row to try to get it to sink in. I've added italics and bold in some places for emphasis.


"It's hard to hear, but it is important to know that God is not committed to supporting our ministries, to preventing our divorces, to preserving our health, to straightening out our kids, to providing a livable income, to ending famine, to protecting us from agonizing problems that generate in our souls an experience that feels like death.

"We cannot count on God to arrange what happens in our lives in ways that will make us feel good.

"We CAN count on God to patiently remove all the obstacles to our enjoyment of Him. He is committed to our joy, and we can depend on Him to give us enough of a taste of that joy and enough hope that the best is still ahead to keep us going in spite of how much pain continues to plague our hearts.

"God's intense desire is to intimately relate with us. For His desire to be realized, He must remove the obstacle within us that, more than any other, stands in the way of intimacy with Him.

That obstacle is this:

When we feel bad, when our internal experience as we live in this world is different from and less than what we know we were created to feel, we assume there is no higher value than to change that experience. We therefore devote our central energies to feeling better and to justifying whatever does the job.

The belief that there's no higher good than feeling better now, and the top priority URGE to feel better now - these represent the single biggest obstacle to our enjoying God's Presence. The Bible calls it The Flesh.


Whew....a lot for me to consider - what in this world have I been using to make myself feel better, even justifying it as a blessing from God, that is in fact doing the opposite and dulling my desire for pure unadulterated intimacy with God Himself?