Looking Forward To A New Year

My husband walked through the door today carrying with him the next workbook I will be delving into in our next Wednesday night Bible Study group at Bethel. Its a series involving my absolute favorite BETH MOORE, as well as Priscilla Shirer (also fabulous), and Kay Arthur (who I'm not familiar with, but looking forward to meeting). Needless to say....I'm giddy with excitement over this next 6-week course. Its a study of David called "Anointed, Transformed, Redeemed".....promises to be POWERFUL!!! I just can't wait. Beth Moore has just absolutely changed my perspective on so many levels....and God has used her to really bring so much depth to my life. I know many of you ladies would agree with me, here. Her words are truly words of Life....spoken straight from the heart of Jesus. God is using her as a tool to breathe life into so many dry bones....its amazing. I can't say enough good about her....words fall short. I wrapped up 2009 with her study of Inheritance. Lifechanging. I started off the year having so many questions. Maybe its just my age....but for the past two years I've been sort of evaluating life up to this point. Feeling as if I have alot of years behind me...and yet still many to come (possibly)....and so what does this mean? What impact is my life having on the lives around me? What do I do with my "past life"...and does it have any affect on my "current life"....and if so, does it have any relevance in my "future life"?? I was literally FILLED with questions this past year. I couldn't stand the idea of laying on my deathbed and looking back on life and relationships and seeing.....nothing. Or even worse...standing before my Saviour and Him asking me what I did with my gifts, my talents, my life....and having only wood, hay, and stubble to lay at His feet. So, I signed up for her study on Inheritance....not realizing that God was about to answer all the questions that had been bouncing around so long in my heart that I could feel the bruises. It took me so completely off guard. I would either come home bursting with everything God was showing me that Jesse would just laugh at me. Or I'd come home so quiet...because I couldn't quite put it all into words. The most impacting, lifechanging part of her study, for me, was her application of the verse in Psalms 16:6, "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, surely I have a delightful inheritance." When she first started talking about this...my mind immediately skipped to friends or family or others that I know that have experienced things in their lives...whether very recent, or in the past....that was much, much less than "pleasant". Several faces immediately made their way to the forefront of my mind, and with all the bitterness, anger, and heartbreak in their souls yelled, "YOU CALL THIS PLEASANT?!?!?" As tears filled my eyes, I knew my own soul was desperately seeking an answer to this question. She methodically layed out 4 boundary lines in the simple shape of a rectangle. (The shape is not in itself important.) The upper most line was labeled "Intimacy With God"....and that was pretty straightforward. If one is not spending time getting to know God on a deeper level....then everything else is thrown to the wind. Its the most important boundary line for our life. The next line was our "Pasts". Mostly meaning hurtful or painful experiences, failures, difficult things. Most of us want to bury our pasts....not bring them up, not discuss them, pretend they never happened. She, herself having a very painful past recognized the difficulty in talking about these things or revisiting them...but she said how important it is to claim every part of our land....and those painful things are part of our land. Embrace them...Learn what there is to learn from those things...but don't shut them out...everyone doesn't need to hear the details...but there are hurting people that God brings our way that need to know what God brought us through. God has a purpose in bringing us through various situations. The next boundary line was "life experiences" and this mainly focused on basic things like where we grew up, our education, our career, our family. The last boundary line was "Giftings". She talked about the difference between a gift and a talent...for they are very different. And, how important it is to discover what our giftings are. And how when our natural talent collides with our God-given gifting...there is an explosion!! Awesome, huh?? When we function within these four boundary lines....our life will be transformed. It was an astounding way to end the year....and bring to end a period of time that was full of disheartening questions. I'm so excited about this next year...but really this next decade. I know that my life is but a breath of air and then I'm gone....but if I'm going to be a breath....I want to be a deep one:-) I refuse to be bored with life....I'm in it for the Adventure....:-)