Different.

Today's sermon was great. There were some wonderful questions posed:

How have you seen God protecting you in your life?
How has God been providing for you?
Have we given up hope that there is someone out there that is always going to be there (i.e., God)?

I'll try to go into some of these in another post. What I wanted to talk about before I fall asleep is the activity we did at the end of the sermon. Our pastor asked us to take little cards out of our bulletins and use them like a "thank you" card to God for all he's done for us, because it's been a lot. I was able to open up more to him about why I'm scared about the future and how I feel about everything going on that seems to be threatening what I thought He was asking me to do. I hadn't really talked to Him about it so I think it was much needed and refreshing.

And what hit me was that the main reason (or at least, one of them) that I was so concerned about having my whole future figured out now was because that's just what the world expects. Waiting for God to respond and just being patient for that in the meantime is borderline if not full out crazy in our world. And so I'm scared how the world (which, being raised here, much of that is in me too) will react to me not being figured out, to me not loving money and not craving a regular job that allows me to provide for the "standard" family that one must have.

It was at that moment I realized how thankful I was that God is not like this world. He is all the things the world doesn't quite understand:  unwavering love that does not choose, peace beyond anything we could imagine, and so much more. He is the Father that has never harmed us or insulted us or let us down, even on accident. Not even once. And you know what? That is so awesome. And we can't really understand it. Billy Graham said this:  "There's a lot of things about salvation I don't understand. But that's okay." We don't get it but I think that's part of the magic.

We also talked about His sacrifice on the cross and how since He's given His son, why would He withhold any small thing? (Answer:  if it's not for our good, which is a whole other blog post sometime later.) This chorus in a song during communion this morning broke me down when I really let the words sink in:

Oh to be like You,
Give all I have just to know you,
Jesus there's no one besides You,
Forever the hope in my heart.

He really gave everything. Just to know us. Even for the people he knew were never going to love Him. Simply. Amazing.

But I need to sleep now. I apologize if this is jumbled (took Benadryl, hardly awake).

Peace & Blessings