Thursday 17 December 2015
Gift Issues
This is the season for gift giving, but I have issues with gifts, especially the ones God gives me. When God gives us gifts they can become tightly held possessions that we love more than God, which is not good. This is something I have been painfully aware of, for most of my life. In fact I am so afraid that I will become too attached to God's gifts, that I go the opposite way and don't allow myself to enjoy God's gifts at all. I thought that this attitude was a super spiritual one, but lately I have been realising that fear is never from God. Also it occurred to me that this may be part of the reason I struggle with depression. But more importantly I realised lately that God wants me to enjoy the blessings He gives me. James 1:17 says "every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." I would be pretty offended if I gave my daughter something super awesome for her birthday and she did not want to receive it because she might enjoy it too much. There is a difference between idolising the gifts God gives which is wrong, and refusing to receive them at all. So how do I find balance, so that fear does not prevent me from enjoying all of God blessings.
One solution involves focusing on the giver not the gifts. I can do this by remembering to praise God for the gifts He gives instead of getting distracted by the gift alone. It is when I let pride and greed in, and I forget about God that I am in danger of sinning. But if I keep God first in my life I can enjoy the gifts and not worry about making them too important. For instance, if I get a new sweater as a Christmas gift, it is good to praise God for it and enjoy getting to wear it. Being thankful to God for the gifts is a much better solution than not allowing myself to enjoy the gifts at all. Because the very act of trying to prevent myself from enjoying things causes a lot of despair and frustration. God wants me to be experiencing His joy and peace not despair!
Another way to make sure I don't love the gifts more than God is to make sure I share the gifts. If I am looking for ways to bless others with my gifts than I don't hold the gifts to tightly. One of God's blessing that I have trouble truly enjoying is my horses. I feel guilty that I have them when others who want horses don't have them. But I can share my horses with those people and God can use my horses to bless them. This prevents me from loving my horses more than God because I am willing to share them with whoever He asks me to. Sharing keeps the focus off the gift itself and puts it on God who we are serving with our gifts.
Sometimes I feel just a vague feeling of guilt or anxiety when I go to enjoy some of my gifts. Is this because I am actually sinning or just Satan trying to rain on my parade, and tempting me with false guilt. I have learnt that I can examine my heart and my actions to determine if I am sinning and not assume if I feel guilty that I have done something wrong. For instance if I buy an MP3 player I really want, even when I don't have the money, I am sinning. That is not a gift that God has given me, but I gift I have sinned to acquire and so I should repent and return it. However if I have saved up, made sure my hubby is good with my purchase and I get an MP3 player then I do not need to feel anxious and guilty. Then it is good for me to thank God for my new purchase and enjoy listening to some good music! God does not want me to let false guilt steal my joy.
On a deeper level I think I might be afraid to enjoy God's blessings because in the past some things I have been given have then been taken away and that hurt. I don't know how to deal with the pain of loss so I just prevent myself from getting attached at all. For instance, in the past I have lost some close friends who have rejected me. So I have shut down parts of my heart. I have erected walls and limits on how happy I allow myself to feel, as my solution to the pain of loss. Satan has lied to me and told me that to avoid pain I need to not feel pleasure. But I am starting to see that this is a lie from the pit of hell. God has other solutions for dealing with the pain of loss; much better solutions! Without going into to much detail, (that will be another blog) what are God's solutions for the pain of loss? They involve grieving, trusting, and expecting God to comfort and restore. So I don't need to prevent myself from enjoying the gifts. I can enjoy what God gives me and trust God to heal me and restore me if loss happens. Jesus said in John 10: 10 "the thief (Satan) comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows). Trusting God gives me the freedom to enjoy what He gives instead of letting Satan steal my joy.
Thursday 10 December 2015
a new dimension
Last Sunday we had a bit of an incident before church. In the past something of this magnitude would have ruined my whole day. So what was different about this time?: I handled it God's way and that changed everything. Sometimes it can feel that the Bible is an old irrelevant book that has no real barring on today. But this "old" book is where I learned the revolutionary new way to respond to unexpected difficulties. It says in Philippians 4:6&7:"6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." In the past I struggled with anxiety on a good day so if anything went amiss my anxiety would go into hyper drive. This seemed to just make the situation I was struggling with worse. I would get stuck in this negative funk that coloured the situation and made me feel hopeless. I played out the worst case scenario in my mind. Then the complaining and questioning God would begin. Since I was planning for and expecting the situation to go badly it did. When you approach challenges with this mind set it causes emotional torture but I think it also effects the outcome of the issue in a very negative way. My experiences in the past have prov en this true.
But Sunday I approached my issue with a different attitude; the one God asks us to have in Philippians 4:6&7. Sunday morning I had gotten dressed in my church clothes and was just sitting down to relax for a bit and there was a knock on our door. Ashley who boards horses with us and does the chores on Sunday morning apologetically informed me that the horse water bowl was angry and violently overflowing. Her horse Pal thought we had done it on purpose and was happily drinking from his personal horse size water fountain. Regardless of Pal making the best of the situation, this was a bad situation that needed immediate fixing. This is not he first time this automatic heated water trough has malfunctioned. It has won many a battle in the past and even the times I have conquered it I have taken 4 plus hours to wrangle it back into control. Usually I give up and have to call in the big guns: my husband or father. Just the mention of water trough issues is enough to send me into a spiral of anxiety that ends in panic, complaining, and failure.
But this time God gave me the strength to not go there, and deal with it His way instead. So I started to pray instead of beginning with complaining and frustration. Now in the past I thought I was praying but saying "God please help I seriously can't believe this happened to me!" and then slipping into self pity and doubting that God would do anything is not really prayer. At least it is not very effective or pleasing to God. But this time I was not praying with a negative attitude. I was able to give control of the situation to God and trust Him to fix it. Trust is so much more fun than anxiety. Instead of being mad that my water bowl was acting up I thanked God out loud that I was blessed enough to have a heated water bowl for my horses. I think in the past when I was complaining I was giving the devil permission to wreck havoc in my life. By complaining and thinking the worst I was agreeing with Satan instead of agreeing with God. So this time when I agreed with God the "peace that transcends all understanding" that is talked about in Philippians materialised in my heart right there in the middle of my problem. I did not panic this time, I calmly but quickly proceeded to fix the water bowl.
I knew the first thing I had to do was get the water turned off to the bowl. But that was not as easy as it first appeared. I rushed to the basement where the shut off valve is only to remember that wood was blocking it. This meant I would have to go around the wood furnace and the water heater to the dark spidery area behind to get to the valve. So I rushed up stairs where I searched 3 places before finding the flashlight I needed to crawl behind everything. Then when I crouching past the water heater I flipped some switch and hot water poured all over me. Each of these complications in the past would have plunged me further into anxiety and panic. But this time I was depending on God not on me and He came through. The peace that was guarding my heart continued to pour into my spirit and so I just screamed and closed the switch and continued on to the water shut off. I could not remember which way to turn the tap but remembered righty tighty lefty loosey and got it done. I carefully returned past the furnace and water heater and ran up stairs. I throw on a coat over my wet church clothes and went outside past the barn to waiting the water trough.
The couple days before I had been transferring all my notes from last years day timer to my new one. One of the notes was from the last time I had to fix the water trough. God had prompted me at that time to write down what I had learned the hard way through trial and error about how to fix the water trough. I was so glad I had listened and wrote stuff down because now I needed to use it to avoid the pitfalls that had resulted in hours of extra work the last time. In the past I would have got bogged down second guessing myself and wasted a lot of time deliberating about what to try first. But I thanked God for planting the needed wisdom from the last time I tried to fix the trough freshly in my mind. When I got to the bowl and saw that the float was no longer attached, I did not get stuck I just confidently reattached the float. I also asked Ashley to help which made it so much easier. In the past I would have wanted to try to do it myself and that never ended well. I was not totally sure that I had the float on right but instead of freaking out about it I just left everything else off and first ran down and turned the water back on. When I returned to the trough and could see that it was all operating well then Ashely put the cover back on. The last time I tried to fix the trough it had taken me about 4 hours but this time with trusting God instead of being anxious it took 15 minutes. Not only did it get fixed but while fixing it I did not loose my peace. I could victoriously go back inside and change into some dry clothes and be on time for and enjoy church. David said in Psalms "with my God I can scale a wall". I say "with my God I can calm an angry water trough!"
But Sunday I approached my issue with a different attitude; the one God asks us to have in Philippians 4:6&7. Sunday morning I had gotten dressed in my church clothes and was just sitting down to relax for a bit and there was a knock on our door. Ashley who boards horses with us and does the chores on Sunday morning apologetically informed me that the horse water bowl was angry and violently overflowing. Her horse Pal thought we had done it on purpose and was happily drinking from his personal horse size water fountain. Regardless of Pal making the best of the situation, this was a bad situation that needed immediate fixing. This is not he first time this automatic heated water trough has malfunctioned. It has won many a battle in the past and even the times I have conquered it I have taken 4 plus hours to wrangle it back into control. Usually I give up and have to call in the big guns: my husband or father. Just the mention of water trough issues is enough to send me into a spiral of anxiety that ends in panic, complaining, and failure.
But this time God gave me the strength to not go there, and deal with it His way instead. So I started to pray instead of beginning with complaining and frustration. Now in the past I thought I was praying but saying "God please help I seriously can't believe this happened to me!" and then slipping into self pity and doubting that God would do anything is not really prayer. At least it is not very effective or pleasing to God. But this time I was not praying with a negative attitude. I was able to give control of the situation to God and trust Him to fix it. Trust is so much more fun than anxiety. Instead of being mad that my water bowl was acting up I thanked God out loud that I was blessed enough to have a heated water bowl for my horses. I think in the past when I was complaining I was giving the devil permission to wreck havoc in my life. By complaining and thinking the worst I was agreeing with Satan instead of agreeing with God. So this time when I agreed with God the "peace that transcends all understanding" that is talked about in Philippians materialised in my heart right there in the middle of my problem. I did not panic this time, I calmly but quickly proceeded to fix the water bowl.
I knew the first thing I had to do was get the water turned off to the bowl. But that was not as easy as it first appeared. I rushed to the basement where the shut off valve is only to remember that wood was blocking it. This meant I would have to go around the wood furnace and the water heater to the dark spidery area behind to get to the valve. So I rushed up stairs where I searched 3 places before finding the flashlight I needed to crawl behind everything. Then when I crouching past the water heater I flipped some switch and hot water poured all over me. Each of these complications in the past would have plunged me further into anxiety and panic. But this time I was depending on God not on me and He came through. The peace that was guarding my heart continued to pour into my spirit and so I just screamed and closed the switch and continued on to the water shut off. I could not remember which way to turn the tap but remembered righty tighty lefty loosey and got it done. I carefully returned past the furnace and water heater and ran up stairs. I throw on a coat over my wet church clothes and went outside past the barn to waiting the water trough.
The couple days before I had been transferring all my notes from last years day timer to my new one. One of the notes was from the last time I had to fix the water trough. God had prompted me at that time to write down what I had learned the hard way through trial and error about how to fix the water trough. I was so glad I had listened and wrote stuff down because now I needed to use it to avoid the pitfalls that had resulted in hours of extra work the last time. In the past I would have got bogged down second guessing myself and wasted a lot of time deliberating about what to try first. But I thanked God for planting the needed wisdom from the last time I tried to fix the trough freshly in my mind. When I got to the bowl and saw that the float was no longer attached, I did not get stuck I just confidently reattached the float. I also asked Ashley to help which made it so much easier. In the past I would have wanted to try to do it myself and that never ended well. I was not totally sure that I had the float on right but instead of freaking out about it I just left everything else off and first ran down and turned the water back on. When I returned to the trough and could see that it was all operating well then Ashely put the cover back on. The last time I tried to fix the trough it had taken me about 4 hours but this time with trusting God instead of being anxious it took 15 minutes. Not only did it get fixed but while fixing it I did not loose my peace. I could victoriously go back inside and change into some dry clothes and be on time for and enjoy church. David said in Psalms "with my God I can scale a wall". I say "with my God I can calm an angry water trough!"
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