February 9, 2017

Greetings My Friend, My read through the Bible in a year has me reading in Exodus. For years I have found myself all absorbed in each of the plagues and a remembering when I was working as a youth adviser when the children at camp were learning a song "Let my people go," which plays through my mind as I read. This time I found myself taking a different look as I read the historical events, I saw God telling Moses exactly what to do with each plague and then when Pharoah asked Moses to make the plague stop, Moses often asked what time then Paroah sent Moses to pray to God to make it stop. My lesson today actually started with a conversation I had with Junior about how the people "heard" Moses talk about God but actually believed the miracles were from Moses. I see where I myself have felt I did something myself. My faith journey has slowly shown me I do very little on my own but with God's strength. I do not overcome my emotional struggles on my own even though I may be in counseling or support groups, even with medication. God has guided me, held me and given me the words, the thoughts so that I was able to do what I do. I started to see this interaction early in my faith walk. There were the times I had lifted up a prayer asking God to help me have the right attitude, the words to talk with others. Many times I found myself saying things and later I wondered where in the world those words came from, I felt like "was that really me who said that?" Later I started to see how God taught me to go through marriage retreats with Junior and how to relate to Junior with "man thinking" ways. I learned to ask God to teach me to be Junior's wife and I found myself enjoying my man. I found myself in a happy marriage and for the first time in my life I believed that a man and a woman could really enjoy each other and be best friends. Until Junior I felt that men and women just endured each other. It would be easy to think I was a good woman to be married to but having a failed marriage and dysfunction pointed me toward finding poor relationships. I know for a fact that learning to accept Jesus as my Savior, seeing how ugly sin is to God by looking at the cross that my life has changed because God has been teaching me to turn to Him for all things no matter how small or how large. Living with PTSD due to abuse meant that I had undue fear of men, God has helped me walk away from fear. I used to relive my fears all day everyday, with God's direction I now can go days and weeks without being afraid that I may be hurt again. Our relationship with Jesus and His Father is a spiritual relationship and God will provide for our earthly needs, not our wants. I am understanding this more fully. I can also relate to these OT stories where I believe God is real, but it takes years to understand this relationship is more spiritual than fleshly. Somehow I wonder if we learn these spiritual things we will live in heaven a life that is good and right. If we do not comprehend the spiritual nature of our relationship with Jesus and do not accept the gift of the cross we are choosing our eternity not in heaven but in hell which is explained rather explicitly in the Bible. God is love as we have learned but God has insisted we must believe He is God and His Son is Jesus so we must accept Jesus and allow the Holy Spirit to grow us spiritually and if we do not then we have chosen hell for our eternity. May God bless you and keep you make His face shine on you. Love Janet