Here to Stay

I mentioned in my last post on rest that I have a brain that is very active even when trying to sleep. As annoying as it is, it has proved to be a blessing as well. 
Sleep is truly a wonderful thing! I love it. Especially since I have asked Jesus to meet me in my sleep and He does. Not only do I have dreams where He tells me I am loved, several times when I have awakened in the middle of the night my first thoughts have been to pray for whatever thought woke me up and to surrender it to the Lord. It's funny because most often my first thoughts in the morning are really incomplete and don't even make sense. But when I think on Jesus..He makes sense. 

A couple days ago I decided to reflect on what the Lord has been working in my life lately and I started by reading my blogs from 2011. I went through a brief valley in January of that year and it was interesting to see how I have grown in knowing the Lord since then. After reading through blogposts, I read through my prayer journal. Let me tell you, not only is my God loving.. He is faithful as well. 
He is consistent and He is faithful. 

My discipleship group is starting to examine the fruits of the Spirit. This may sound funny, and maybe even ridiculous, but I never really stopped to consider that all these things were characteristics of God. Of course "fruits of the Spirit" mean they come from God, but I think I've more considered them as things that grow in us if we abide in Christ. That's true. But it's characteristics of God that we get to experience by drawing near to Christ. Those fruits are the choice morsels of life we harvest in order to share with a hungry, starving world that has never tasted how good God is. 
In John 15 we see that Christ asks us to remain in Him, remain in His love and bear much fruit. While we get the benefit of partaking in the fruit ourselves, we were meant to share it. Share it with other believers, share it with non-believers. Share it with people who don't know what love tastes like. Who don't know what joy tastes like. Who don't know what peace tastes like. 

I've tasted it. I've tasted and seen that the Lord is good. And you know what? It's satisfying. I could partake of all the different junk foods of this world and while it might taste good in the moment, it will only leave me feeling bloated and gross and craving it more. 
So Paul tells us, as Christians, we are to train like athletes, like olympians pushing hard for the gold medal at the end of the competition. And when you think truly on what an athletes diet consists of, it probably has a lot more fruit than it does french fries. 

Okay, enough with the food tangent, I was just eating supper with my roommate and we're both being health conscious of what we eat for the sake of our intestinal health and so eating healthy is kind of on my mind. God's faithfulness is really what is causing my heart to flutter at this moment. 

Yesterday, Saturday, my day was filled to the brim. It started with me picking up a needed car part a little after 8:30am. Once I was home my friend, Reed, came over and installed it for me and then we discovered my car had died and so shortly after he left my friend, Deven, came over and jumped my car and mounted the part Reed installed and then Deven stuck around to make sure my car was safe to drive which included him installing a chain to keep the hood down and then me feeding him lunch and by the time he left it was about 2:30. And I was only alone long enough to gather what was needed for a Valentine making party and head off to my friend, Amanda's, apartment where I spent several hours with some other girls from connection group and I got home a little after 8pm and was only alone long enough to make a few plans, wash some wine glasses and then rush off to a sister evening with Grace and Pearl and by the time I was home around midnight, I was tired enough to fall asleep right away. 
So, basically, I don't like to be alone. Even those couple 5 or 10 minutes of having the house to myself before I rushed off to my next thing, I just felt uncomfortable with it. 

It's funny, cuz I could have the house to myself when I'm doing quiet time and I wouldn't feel alone. Christ spoke such beautiful words when he was physically on earth. "I am with you always, even to the end of the age."Some times I think He spoke them just for me and they were written down so that however many thousand years later I would read them and come to put my stake in the ground on that promise and pitch my tent there. I like Him being with me. I like knowing that He will never leave me. I like knowing that no matter what I put Him through, how He feels about me will never change and His affections will never die. I like how secure I am in His faithfulness. I like how no matter what, He thinks I'm precious. I like how He has faithfully and relentlessly pursued my heart even when my feelings for Him were not strong and even though He has captured my heart, He doesn't stop showing off. He doesn't stop. He is faithful. You know why? Because He thinks I'm worth it. 
How better to affirm that than stick to His guns and consistently pursue a heart that doesn't consistently love or honor or demonstrate that same passion in return? That speaks to my heart. That gets me. That's one of my love languages. I know there's really only 5 that people talk about, but I have a couple extra.

Speaking of love, I've gotten such positive responses from my, "Holy and Dearly Loved" post. I feel loved in how people have responded. (I think that's another love language I have). I decided to take what I learned from this last dark season and apply it to every dark season I can remember going through. What I found was, that throughout my life, God has consistently been teaching me how to love. And not just love, but love well. When I think of what I was like before I knew Jesus I rather chuckle because I was not a loving person. At all. God is so funny. Of course He was gonna take the most unloving, selfish, mean-spirited, rebellious heart and teach it to love. Me...of all people, love. 

More than that, He's put me in women's ministry. *That* is what's really funny. If there was ever a girl who didn't know the first thing on relating to their own sex and loving them well, I win.
You wanna know what it took to get me to that place? A relentless, loving, faithful God. You wanna know how long it's taken so far? 21 years. He's been after me for 21 years and He still promises He's gonna be around for however many years I have left. And after those years, I'm gonna be with Him for eternity. Forever. And He doesn't get sick of me. That's a whole lotta faithfulness right there. 

I hope I'm faithful. I can learn to love, but if I can't do that consistently or faithfully, that's not going to be worth a whole lot. You can't water a flower once and hope it will keep from wilting. You can't water a seed once and hope it will grow to a point of bearing fruit. You can't stick  your neck out and love that difficult person one time and hope that it changes their entire countenance or attitude. 

This afternoon, I took one of the most glorious naps I've had in a long time. It was a rainy sunday afternoon and after having reflected on how God's faithfulness has been another display of His love I found myself crawling under my covers to thaw out my toes a little. With the rain pattering on the skylight above my bed, I soon fell fast asleep where my loving Jesus met me in my dreams. I love that. I love waking up and feeling loved because I was reminded of it while I was asleep. I love that God can use an active sleeping brain to display His glory and character. He pursues me in my sleep. 

There was a point last semester when I found myself having a difficult and painful conversation with someone and all throughout I was praying the Lord would be near to my heart. As I kept my team of prayer warriors updated, one of them had texted me with the lines to a song we sing in Salt that goes, "Yahweh, Yahweh. Faithful God, you're here to stay. Yahweh, Yahweh forever and always the same."
And in that moment, I felt God with me. I knew He wasn't gonna leave. No matter what, He was in it for the long haul. And I have come to know Him better since then. 

After all that I've gone through up to this point, more than anything in the world, no matter what life takes me through in the future, no matter what Satan tells me about God causing the pain in my world, no matter what trial, what sorrow, what mountain or valley, I want *my* response to be, "Faithful God, I'm here to stay."You know why? I wanna be like that. I want to be known as a faithful person. I want people to get a taste of who God is. And if that is not a fruit that I'm displaying in my life, than people who interact with me aren't going to know. I want them to know. 

They need to know that my faithful Father is here to stay.