"Death Becomes Me"

It has been so long since I have put the proverbial pen to the paper…or simply laid my hands on the keyboard to write what is going on in my head. I have had so many heavy things on my mind as of late but the one thing I have been struggling with is that the farther I go out on this limb to follow God and ask even more of him…the more the Devil presents himself…. and he really is hitting below the belt. He attacks by using people that mean so much to you or who have the potential to be a part of my life in a meaningful way. My prayer list continues to grow longer and longer. Back in the day my prayer list was more like a Christmas List of my needs. Now it is a death list…meaning when I pray, it is for all the things I must die to. And there are many because even though I try very hard to follow God every minute of every day I understand that I am not perfect.

Living with the God I am in relationship with through Jesus is giving me the opportunity to seize the true freedom to be the person that God created me to be. I am really beginning to realize for the first time in my almost 41 years that it is such an amazing and undeserved blessing that God is ordering me to willingly turn away from this world’s dead-end ways in order to gain and hold on tight to the life Jesus wants for me.

It is because of this knowledge that I hold right now that I am being pursued by a dark soul. I have had hatred spewed on me as of late by people that I care about. I have had situations cross my path that I thought could be good for me but I had to really evaluate and walk away from those situations because I realized they were not from Him. Then, there have been moments recently where I have had to ask HIM for forgiveness once again for something I have done or something that I have thought of doing.

Friends, I am here to tell you that the closer you get to God, the more the Devil will try to engage you in a footrace. It is the days that I feel like I am losing the race that I pray the hardest to die…It is this knowledge that gives me the most hope because when you begin to die to self this is what happens….the good you do is spoke of from an evil perspective, your wishes are ignored, the advice you hand out can be ignored, your thoughts and opinions are ridiculed. In those moments I am REFUSING to let anger overtake my heart or to avidly defend myself. Instead, I am PRAYING about patience, endurance and loving silence during those times… and it is in those moments that I DIE!