He Speaks With Purpose

We recently started a 13 week bible study on Sunday nights at our church; "Experiencing God" by Henry Blackaby and his son Richard Blackaby.  The study, for me, is a startling reflection of the 3 years we spent on the east coast of Florida, where God lead us to a church that was instrumental in maturing and growing our faith.

In a face book posting, as we were preparing to leave Florida and move back to Tennessee, I expressed the experience of a "Sunday school teacher that 'made the bible come alive' in a way that reached deep, leaving us hanging onto every word..... and a pastor's 'preaching the word' kept us hungry for the next Sunday and the next sermon...truly restoring our souls."

The "reflection" that I see of those years, in this study, also projects a glimpse of the work ahead he is inviting me into today at the church we have made our home.
As I am going through the homework this week, day four "God Speaks to His People" leaped off the page at me this morning, reminding me of a blog I had written about a year after arriving on the sunny shores....... as I mention in that blog, I heard the voice of God say, "restore your soul" (Dec 2014) 

Blog post Oct 2016~~~~~~

"The voice of God; what does it sound  like?
The rumble of low thunder as a storm rolls in? The roar of a mighty lion claiming his territory? Maybe more like the sound of the ocean waves as they rush to the seashore? Perhaps, even like the faint echo from a mountain top as it bounces across a canyon, the soft coo of a morning dove or just as silent as the flutter of a butterfly's wings?

However He chooses to communicate with us, He does speak, just as surely as he spoke to the prophets in the old testament and to his disciples as he walked in flesh in the new testament. Priscilla Shirer says in her book, Discerning the voice of God,  "one of the most common reasons we don't hear His voice is we simply are not listening".

Retirement was something I always thought of as a long way off in the future, a reward for the sacrifice of trading my time for dollars. The world I had surrounded myself with for so long began to fall away......like the peeling away of the layers of an onion or maybe it was more like the layers of a scab, healing a wound left by years of being tossed back and forth in the sea of the work world. What I didn't expect was that retirement would cause such a loss of identity that would take a while to find again. And as each layer fell away, the new world around me began to look differently than what I had imagined it would be.

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At the end of that first year, when the rush of life stopped rushing, when the noise of the busy world became quiet, when the mornings called me to sit before His majestic handiwork and listen, I heard the voice of God say.........

"restore your soul"

Since that day, 'His plans for me"(Jeremiah 29:11) have changed my view from the quiet serenity of a little farm pond to the crashing waves of the Atlantic ocean. He has taught me that restoring my once stressed and work weary soul, can only be done by letting the layers covering the scabs of the past to drop away. He has whispered "wait" (Psalm 27:14) to my soul......

I sat quietly this morning, drinking in the beauty of the view of my tropical world from the screened porch as well as my morning coffee and reading a devotional from Holley Gerth's "Do You Know You are Already Amazing".
The title, "You Don't Need to Do It All" was taken from the story of Martha and Mary in Luke 10: 38-42. The attitudes of the sisters were totally different: Martha felt the need to do it all, while Mary felt she needed to give Jesus her all.
So many times we believe we have to do it all, give it our all and we are left worn out by the world. It's at that weakened time, the enemy of our souls sees us distracted and moves in to steal our peace, leaving us worried, upset and stressed out as we often experienced in the workplace. Even though I have found retirement to be a reward and a reprieve, a chance to restore my soul, the same reward can be found on a quiet Saturday morning looking out at the wonders God has created, whether the view is a mountain top, an ocean shore or simply the birds outside our window....a few minutes alone with our maker can set things right with our world.

As Holley Gerth points out, this story isn't really about the attitudes of the two sisters, it's the attitudes behind our choices. Both Martha and Mary loved and served Jesus, but on this day, only Mary wanted to enjoy Him. It's up to us to make a different, better choice. Scripture says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Phil. 4:13)