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What if we all checked out of the rat race and just fought the good fight today?

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I love teaching adults for so many reasons…

They stay in their chairs…

When you tell them to read something, they bend their sweet heads down and do what you told them to do; and then one by one, as they finish the passage…they raise their eyes and smile and wait for everyone else…

You don’t have to bring treats, but if you do…

they act like…

“OH! I shouldn’t have…my diet….but…”

and then they take one to be nice.

And they manage to eat them without leaving a puddle of crumbs and crumpled napkins on the floor. Which is a bonus in itself.

But mostly I love it because we learn so much from each other.

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We each one bring nuggets gleaned from other teachings…whether we learned them from a book, or a sermon, or from the road of our own experience.

We have stuff we have dealt with and stuff God is still working on and together we plow through passages and ask questions.

We ponder and discuss and pray and care.

So this past Sunday, when I launched into trying to share a few things God had taught me during the week from Mark 7 about the inward junk of my human heart that will leak out as so much sewage into an already messy world…

it took a village to eek out the ideas that were flooding in my head and heart in a way that learning could take place.

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I love how God’s Word speaks to each one of us and when we open it up and study it together, we gain new insights into this process of “Sanctification”

I love how, if we stop trying to defend ourselves to an unbelieving world, and start believing God’s Word to work in us…the door opens wide for that transforming love of God to make us more like Jesus.

Which is, after all, the point of being saved to begin with.

And I love how, as we become more conscious of our shortcomings, we can appreciate more and more His overcoming.

A great example happened as I was rambling out a lengthy scenario of how I can get all worked up over some issue that I have absolutely no control over. With just a snippet of information from a peek over the walls  of my little world, I can paint broad strokes of “what-if’s” and soon have myself solidly planted into quite a storm of chaos.

Not known for a shortage of words or entertainment potential, I was giving full vent to my example. To say I was carried away with it, might be an understatement.

And as I ran out of wind and steam, a little voice in my head was whispering…

Good grief Laura…how can anyone make sense out of what you just spewed?

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….when, from the front row, a man sighed out a simple phrase…

Vain Imaginings

Wrapped up in two words, he expressed in HIS way the commonality of our human struggle that I had just erupted out in MY way…

our walks and personalities and methodologies differ.

But our struggles are universal.

What sets me off on a tangent of vain imagining is not what will set you off…but we all…

ALL of us…

every single human being…

struggles with the capacity for a mind that runs amuck with self-induced strife.

We live in a world where the thoughts and imaginings and analysis of so many people is crowding around us, even as our own inward thoughts brew into a murky mix of worry, fear and doubt.

So I wonder what might happen today if we just stepped out of the rat race.

Because what sets us apart as followers of Christ is NOT that we DON’T struggle…

but HOW we engage IN the struggle.

I wonder what might happen if, as believers, we didn’t engage in a war of words with those around us but instead asked God to work His Word inside of us.

What if we brought our thoughts and our opinions and suppositions and just set them out before Him and asked Him to clean out the stuff that defiles us?

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Heavenly Father, I am aware that often I create scenes in my head that are loosely based on fact and mostly based on my own faulty and frail understanding. I acknowledge this morning, that in just about every case of what I will face today, my understanding is very limited. It is imprisoned by my self-protective stance and my inability to comprehend that Your plans are beyond what I am capable of thinking OR imagining. I am held captive by my fear that You will somehow let me down so I better have a backup plan. I have a heart that is tainted by pockets of uncleaness. These need to be exposed to the only antidote known to eradicate sin. And so today, I invite You to expose my futile thoughts and replace them with Your Words of Truth…about me, about You, about those I will encounter on the journey today <3

 

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