Love Suffers Long

1 Corinthians 13 is known as the love chapter. It talks all about what true love is and what true love does. The chapter is great, but I have a hard time letting it sink in and change me unless I have personal experience with it.

Have you ever had someone in your life that is hard to love, let alone get along with? I have. She is young, so I try to let her mature on her own and just keep learning, but it's tough. My family was asking for prayer about the situation at church on Sunday and that is when someone reminded us that "love suffers long". All of a sudden 1 Corinthians 13:4 clicked.. "Love suffers long...". That is exactly what God is trying to teach me right now. I wish I could just absorb knowledge from the Bible, but that doesn't seem to work for me or many others. We have to go through the testing. I am being tested on loving this child unconditionally because love is supposed to be long-suffering.

1 Corinthians 13:4 "Love suffers long..." Love everyone no matter how hard the challenge sometimes.

His Great Plan

It's been way too long since I last wrote on here. I guess that's because of insecurities. Stupid insecurities.

I almost always have something to say...something the Lord has put on my heart, but fear holds me back.

Fear that you won't be able to relate. 

Fear that I won't do justice to what The Lord wants me to say. 

It feels like it's a big responsibility to speak on behalf of The Lord...and it is! But if I let the fear of carrying that responsibility hold me back then I'm not being obedient to Gods call. 

After all, He did say,

"What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. 

Matthew 10:27 

I've been learning the past year or so that life is this huge process. 

I'm sure most of us have heard someone say God has great plans for you life and it's true!

I think when we hear that, and see that truth in the Bible, we begin to want that and long to see what that great plan is.

We want to get to the final destination. 

We want to see how this whole plan unfolds.

And that's great because it motivates us. 

Occasionally though (if you're like me) the outcome becomes your focus. You've got your eye on the prize and you don't want any distractions. You want to get there ASAP...and you miss the whole point of this glorious plan.

Plan Definition

dictionary.search.yahoo.com

n. noun

An orderly or step-by-step conception or proposal for accomplishing an objective.

A plan is a step-by-step process and it's that way for a reason! God longs to reveal himself to us. He longs to teach us and see us grow in wisdom. The outcome isn't what will teach us...it's everything we did to get there.

It's those testing times where we are unsure of where we're supposed to go next.  

It's those times when everything is going smoothly and we learn to bless The Lord.

It's those times when nothing seems to go right and we have no choice but to lean on Jesus and seek His face...and we learn to bless Him through the hard times as well. 

And as much as we just want to run away from the process...we will never escape it. So we learn how to handle it. We learn how to grow in it because we know that "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame," 

We are built in the process. It's where our character is built. It's where we make relationships. It's where we fall more and more in love with our savior...and it's then that we realize just how important the process is.

        "We want everything right now, but faith is found in the process.” - Russell Evans

Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Romans 5:2-5