Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Getting Right With God Again

I'm writing this post this morning before getting any work done. Today isn't a particularly stressful day for me, as far as work goes. I should spend some time writing for BlogMutt, and I have one client who is waiting for blog posts for her blog and they're due on Friday. But first, I need to write about a few things that are happening in my spiritual life.

I've been struggling for about a week now. I seem to have caught a cold and it's causing me a lot of problems. Last night was, by far, the worst. I wasn't able to get to sleep for a long time because I kept coughing. I considered sleeping on the couch so I wouldn't wake Craig up, but then I decided that I would try taking some more cold medicine and some Benadryl to try and calm things down (not to mention knock myself out). It worked, and I slept for about four hours straight. Things were a big fitful after that.

I've also been working on losing weight. I started on March 21, 2013 and since then I've lost almost 17 pounds. I'm not thrilled with that amount, but I do look better than I've looked in a long time. It's nice to see myself on camera at church and not despise what I see. (If you'd like to follow my weight loss progress, I write a blog about that here.)

Here's the problem.

Last weekend, my best friend from college came to visit me. I hadn't seen her in a few years, and the last time I saw her, she was confined to a bed in a hospital room because of a cancer diagnosis. She had never met my husband, and she had not met my three-year-old son, despite the fact that I brought him with me when I went to visit her a little over three years ago. So, this visit was really special.

Up until she came to visit, I had really developed a great Bible-reading habit. I would do my devotions every morning with my cup of coffee nearby. Then, I would eat my breakfast and venture out to our back room and do my morning exercise. It had gotten to be a really great routine. However, when I had my friend here, I kind of fell off the wagon as far as the devotions part of the routine goes. I realized this morning that I hadn't done my own morning devotions in over a week. While I do read my Pastor's devotions on his blog, I know I need to be doing my own as well.

The result?

While I don't think God is punishing me, I do believe that I've been in disobedience to Him because I haven't been spending time with Him in the morning. I believe it's made Him sad, and I also believe it's brought me out from under the umbrella of His protection health-wise. So, I believe it's caused me to catch a cold, and I believe it's caused the scale to kind of hover over the same numbers for a few days. Granted, I do believe my scale is broken, I also think that it's given me a "ballpark" number that's been in a fairly downward trend since I started on my weight loss journey in March.

While it might seem that the logical answer would be to just resume my "habit", I'm amazed at how easy it was to fall away from that habit. I was thinking about that this morning while I was getting ready, and thinking about writing this post. Honestly, I don't believe that God wants us to develop a HABIT of spending time with Him. I think He wants us to desire to spend time with Him because we are looking forward to growing in relationship with Him. I think He's excited to spend time with us, and He wants us to feel the same way. Over the past few months, my habit of doing my devotions was akin to brushing my teeth.

I believe that I need to find a way to foster my relationship with God that doesn't revolve around telling myself that I need to read four chapters in the Bible every morning. I am not sure what I should do, but as I write this, I feel like God is telling me that He will tell me what I should do. My logic gets in the way a lot, come to think of it. My ideas usually aren't that good. However, when I lean upon my Daddy, and when I climb up into His lap and snuggle against His chest, great things happen. I love that.

I'm going to spend a few days listening to God's heart. I'll report back here in a few days and let you know where He's leading me. I do know that I want to go deeper in my relationship with Him. I know that involves more than a "religious" commitment to read my Bible.

Hmmm...I'm feeling better already!