Lesson(s) Learned

Scars, Marks, and Understanding the Difference between the Two Every morning, I get an email-devotion sent straight to Gmail. Some mornings I get up, read it, and kind of forget about it. Some days, I don’t get to read it until the afternoon or nighttime. But this morning, however, I woke up to the sound of my devotion-email being delivered to my phone, which happened to arrive to my inbox before 7a.m. Bless them. All jokes aside, I’m sort of glad that I woke up to this devotion-email this morning because I’m pretty sure it’s exactly what I needed to read. (and maybe what some of you need to read also, so I’m going to do what I’ve been teaching my precious twin-toddler-nephews to do: I’m going to “share, share, share, share, share!”) And here goes… My devotion-in-an-email this morning centered around Job13:23b, 27, “Show me my offense and my sin… You keep a close watch on all my paths by putting marks on the soles of my feet .” Ok. There it is. So, I’m unsure ...

I’m not really a fan of country music, unless Taylor Swift counts (I’m pretty sure she doesn’t). With Taylor Swift included or not, I do, oddly enough, know my fair share of “country” music lyrics. One song that has always kind of stuck with me is the one that says, “I thank God for unanswered prayers.” (See, I don’t even know who sings it or what the name of the song is… this just goes to show that I’m so-not-a-country-music-fan.) I don’t know about you, but I don’t thank God for ‘unanswered’ prayers. Know why? They simply don’t exist. For a long time, I kind of thought and felt like they did. I’ve literally spent entire seasons of my life before praying and crying to God about situations in my life that I wished turned out differently than they did. Even if unanswered prayers did somehow exist, I don’t think I’d thank God for them. I think I’d struggle with them. I’d obsess over them. I’d make them a constant concern on my heart/mind. I’d lose sight of G...