Today I was mowing my yard. It is refreshing to finally be mowing some green grass! It has been brown, dead, and very unattractive! I like to mow my grass and I love the way it looks when it is done. I began mowing when I was in high school. As I was mowing today I felt God sharing two truths with me. I am not sure if it is the teacher inside of me that finds a lesson out of everything or if God just has chose to speak to me in this way....maybe it is both. I am reading a great book right now and I believe that my heart is just very open right now to hear everything God would want to say to me.
Every time I have mowed this summer for some reason the bag that catches the grass was coming loose part way through mowing and the dead cut grass would fly up in my face. I would get so mad and frustrated because when it happened once, it would happen again and then again...I would just get going and look down and the bag was jostling loose. I was stopping the mower, adjusting the bag, and then starting the mower back up again. After this happened a few times, I was not just adjusting the bag, I was banging on it to get my frustrations out! This happened all summer. I didn't have to mow too often once the sun came out because my grass was quite dead. But I like it all to be even so I did mow when I probably didn't need to. I told my son Jack that I couldn't figure out why the bag kept doing that and it was making me so frustrated! Did I do anything about it other than let it keep happening over and over all summer long? The extent of my investigation was hitting the bag in to place!
Today while I was mowing, it happened again. This time I looked at it from a different angle and I saw a latch that was suppose to be hooked to the side of the handle to hold the starting cord (not the technical name I am sure) in place. When I was mowing it was hitting the edge of the bag and jarring it out of place. All it took was for me to put the latch in place and that was it. I mowed the rest of my yard with the bag never coming out of place (except to empty it). I kept looking down at that piece, set in it's place, wondering why I hadn't seen it before.
Where am I going with this? As I mowed I kept thinking about sin, habits, attitudes, or lies that I have held on to. Those things are lodged in my thoughts and daily life and they wedge between myself and my walk with the Lord. Sometimes I don't even notice it is there. Sometimes I let it stay there because I don't know how to fix it. Sometimes I don't spend enough time on it to put it in the right place so I can move on in the direction God has for me.
It made me think of all the times I know something is wrong and don't do anything about it. I don't put the sin, attitude, habit or lie in the right place so that it isn't keeping me from working in the way God created me to be. Right now there are a few things that God is pushing me to let go of. He is not whispering in my ear. He is speaking loud and clear and I keep adjusting things to appear okay, but then those things just push my emotions, my choices, my attitudes right out of place and everything blows right back in my face.
God is asking me what I am going to do about. Am I going to put the latch in place and let go or am I going to allow it to keep interfering with my walk with him. And of course I know exactly what those things are...and our loving God is patiently reminding me everyday to trust Him. He is asking me to examine what it means to live a life fully surrendered to Him.
I don't want to keep coming up against something, not surrendering it, and letting it come back over and over. I want to surrender it completely to God. The last few days I have almost been grieving over the fact that I have to let some things go. The eating disorder was (is) connected to shame, guilt and fear. That means when I let go of an eating disorder habit, then I am really releasing something connected with shame, guilt, or fear. And all of that is connected to not feeling worthy. So removing something means I am fully committed to believing I am worthy and putting action behind that believe.
I need to put that latch in it's place!
So now I have to trust God and remove the obstacle(s) that is blocking my progress forward.
The other part of the message I got from our oh so wonderful God will be posted tomorrow...
enough for today...I get to digest all of this.
Blessings, Teresa
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