Snippets

On days like today, when I've gone to bed in full freak out mode and awoke, still panicking, the next day, I take some time to look through a book that's become my "anti-panic attack" book. It's a journal my friend Hannah gave me for my birthday this year, and I've begun to fill it with pictures and quotes that help me refocus and slow my heart down. In the interest of helping me do that this afternoon, I decided to type up a few selections from my book:

Looking at God's Will: "Obedience to the Heavenly Vision"

Obedience to the Heavenly Vision is a short book written by Sam Doherty, the former CEF co-director of Ireland and regional director of Europe along with his wife Sadie. I read it as a part of my support-raising training through CEF, but even if it hadn't been assigned, hopefully I would have picked it up at some point and read it through. I can't tell you how encouraging it was to me!

As I read Obedience, the personal nature of God’s vision stood out to me. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated with God’s call: why are there things He asks me but doesn’t ask my friends? Why does He send them through one route and me through another? I’m like the pot that asks its creator, why have you made me like this? I also frequently wonder if I’ve botched things up enough so that God will give up on me and take His vision elsewhere. But when I doubt my place in His plan, He continues to bring things into my life to remind me how He brought me into ministry, and that my place is here until He takes me out – things like this book.

For someone who tends to pressure herself and compare herself to others, it is liberating to read that His purpose in sending His vision isn’t merely for me to complete a task, nor is it to make me more like someone else. Rather, His revelation is to help me understand who He is; His purpose is to draw me closer to Him. Whatever God has for me will look different in some ways from what He gives to others, in the same way He made me different in looks and personality. Through this plan, He shows me that He values me, that He understands me better than I understand myself, and that His purpose for me is specific.

Encouragement in the face of... stuff.

  A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle was on my shortlist of favorite books for my sophomore and junior years of high school (if you read it, you will understand the appeal it holds for an awkward teenage girl). In the story there was a poem that captured the attention of the heroine and myself. It wasn't "The World", by Henry Vaughan, although that would be a good guess considering the book's title. The poem was actually a short and odd-sounding snippet (to my modern ears) by Sir Thomas Browne, and it helped our moody protagonist as she dealt with the immanent death of her grandfather.