
Every good thing is a gift from God.
Greetings! I’ve taken a hiatus from spending quality time with my husband/spending any time with others/blogging/writing while I’ve dealt with the learning curve of my new job–curriculum coordinator for elementary school and early childhood at CDS in Costa Rica. I don’t ever think I’ll be able to say, “Hey! I’ve got this job down,” but I can say that it is not consuming every waking hour any more.
A few weeks ago I was preparing a teaching for the Women’s Bible Study based on one of Beth Moore’s teachings from her book Breaking Free. It’s a marvelous study and if you haven’t done it, I highly recommend it. This particular study included some mathematics:
My environment + My experiences = My “truth”
My “truth” + 0 = Incomplete
My “truth” + Satan’s lies = Captivity
God’s truth > My “truth”
At the same time I was reading Brendon Manning’s book, Abba’s Child, about God’s “boundless compassion, infinite patience, unbearable forgiveness, and love that keeps no score of wrongs.” As I read his book and thought about Beth Moore’s teaching about self-deception, I ran across this quote:
“And so we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves. As Blaise Pascal wrote, ‘God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.’ Thus, if we feel hateful toward ourselves, we assume that God feels hateful toward us.”
It had never dawned on me before that the same way we can project our feelings upon others, we can project them upon God, but once it finally did, it became obvious that this very fact holds many of us back from a rich love-relationship with God. So I’m going to add a little math of my own:
God’s truth + My acceptance = Peace
Abba, Father, help us to learn to receive your amazing, enduring love each and every day.