I'm clearly bad at this :)

So my ambitions of being a blogger just aren't doing so hot ha. I love to journal and I want to share what's going on in my life and what God is doing in it, but keeping up with this has been too much for me to handle I guess. I have felt like I needed to be embarking on something or beginning something in order to start back up so that I know where to begin. The idea of trying to fill you in on the last several months of my life is OVERWHELMING to me! So instead, I am starting with a clean slate with a beginning. So here it is: my passionate, vulnerable, broken, yet redeemed journey I am taking in this season that God has been calling me to for a while now. 


“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. “In that day,” declares the LORD, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’ Hosea 2:14-16

The Book of Hosea is a prophetic accounting of God’s relentless love for His children. Since the beginning of time God’s ungrateful and undeserving creation has been accepting God’s love, grace, and mercy while still unable to refrain from its wickedness. The last part of Hosea shows how God’s love once again restores His children as He forgets their misdeeds when they turn back to Him with a repentant heart. 


My heart so often turns to other things to satisfy my soul. God's love, grace, and mercy are always before me, and I choose to invest in temporary gratifications. Since I've moved to Grand Rapids, I've had to really reevaluate my identity as I'm no longer in the "limelight" so to speak in any type of ministry or leadership role. To overcome the feelings of missing that season of life, I've turned to things such as Facebook, pinterest, and obsessive home making (seriously, ridiculous ha), to establish an identity for myself outside of what Christ sees in me.


You see, spending hours scanning through my newsfeed, or the pinterest pages, and decorating and redecorating my house have shown to be replacements to find my value, rather than persevering through the wilderness to allow Christ to allure me and reveal my identity to me. 


Too often my relationship with God has become legalistic, where my feelings about how God sees me are based on my performance and how much I've done for Him rather than embracing the grace and salvation I've received.   I want to know the fullness of Christ and that I am full and complete in him alone. I know this will be a life journey, BUT in this season...however long it takes, I want a greater revelation of this. So I'm taking some time off facebook and am only using Pinterest on the weekends since these are my biggest distractions. It's time I respond to the invitation that God has sent me.


Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Hebrews 12:1