Bathing optional.

Are you willing to jump off God's cliffs?

I define bravery as the willingness to trust God with your life.  Not just an ability to squash the fear that rises up before you do something you've never done or never expected to do or think.  I never would have expected that I would not work outside the home for 6 YEARS.  I never dreamed that I would have 4 kids. I never would have said I was someone who works well with small children.  But God does not call the equipped. He equips the called. And the ONLY reason that I find that I can DO THIS, is because of God.

I have wrestled with God. I have wrestled with God. 

And I have come away every time schooled -- like Jacob -- that God will always win.  

Not in this resigned and settled way but because he HAS to win, to save my soul, today, tomorrow, and the next day.  God has given me this assignment for the august purpose of healing me. I have tried to run the other way from God, like Jonah.  I am quick to anger, never slow.  I need to stem my impetuousness, like Peter.  And yet God has trusted ME to raise these 4 little kids. And he has placed ME at the center of their lives, every, single, day.  Wanting me to teach them the character qualities that so often, I doubt I myself have with any consistency: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.   Sometimes I wish he would have given me any easier task, like climbing a mountain, but no He's called me to be at home with these four kids.

And so each day I jump off God's cliff and hope that today I will respond to the days' events the way God wants me to.  Knowing that only His working inside of me is enabling me to have even the hope of doing that.

I do not do the things I want to do.  I do the things that I am primed to do.  

I want so much to be brave.  If not for me, for them.

So let this be my testimony Lord that, by God, I am trying.