Why Sleep When You Could Write

GOOD morning. It has been a while since my last blog post, and I can't promise when the next will come. I've been feeling like I needed to write this for about a week now, and finally, I got swept in the undertow and so here I am, adrift at sea, lost in a world of a blank white page with nothing but words ready to spill over from this inkwell so often called the heart. After reading this post, you may have the impression that what you just read was quite possibly the most unorganized mess of ideas and thoughts ever. But my friends that is what is known as spiritual vomit. And more or less, does not the description of the most unorganized mess of ideas and thoughts describe us perfectly? It is kind of neat how out of such chaos, we find order in God; that out of such imperfection rises a savior.

After conducting a thorough and detailed analysis of the past four weeks of my life, I have realized a couple of things. For starters, I go to bed way too late, and get up way too early. People always say that the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that there is one. When I slept through the time that my family was supposed to arrive for Family Day last Saturday, I realized I couldn't hide from it anymore. So naturally, I went about trying to fix this problem. It just so happened that it took me until 7 a.m. on Saturday night to think of a solution, and by that time, I was tired and so I just decided to "sleep" on it. It's like I am in a constant game of hide and go seek with sleep. I am always looking for it, but I can never find it.

Anyways, I wanted this blog post to talk about some of the ways that God has been at work in my life over the past four weeks, but as I began to look back, I realized that I could probably write a short book on how He has been working in these past four days alone. Here is one of the things that God has revealed or spoken to me to share with you. Don't worry, more will come!

• God has been teaching me a lot about what it means to have joy and why we should have joy. I had a quick discussion with a friend today in which he spoke some truth into my life about joy. He said, "there is a difference between joy and happiness. Happiness is tied to the circumstance, and it can be influenced by external conditions." However, joy is something that comes from within. It is the assurance that God is enough for whatever life may throw at us. Joy comes in the power of salvation, in the realization that we are alive because of a grace so undeserved. Joy is something that we should never lose. Even when the situations are bleak, even when we are going through something of a challenge, we should aim to be so rooted at the foot of the Cross that our Joy does not falter. I really liked this quote by somebody of whom I do not remember the name.
  
  "It is not our struggles that make us who we are, but it is the joy we show during these times of difficulties that determines how bright our light shines for Christ."
  
  How powerful. When I heard things such as this, I aimed to be joyous in all that I did, but that is HARD. Like really really hard. There were times where the very last thing on my mind was being joyous, and there were times where I needed to in layman's terms: "recharge" my joy. But how do we "recharge" our joy? Here's the awesome part. We "recharge" it through prayer. When we connect with God, His fills us back up with His love, with His mercy, and finally, with His joy.

Thanks for reading and catching up. I'll leave you all with one final quote/thought from the devotional "My Utmost for His Highest."

"The secret of a Christian's life is that the supernatural becomes natural in him as a result of the grace of God."

They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love,

Signing off,

JD