These days Jesus is revealing Himself to me more and more, and in the process, letting me see myself through the lens of grace. I had never really thought to look at myself in quite that way, despite what my Glog (God blog) says. I allowed myself very little grace.

In order to see yourself through the lens of grace, you have to believe what Jesus says about you. You need to make Him the authority in your life, over your own thoughts and feelings.

What a journey this has been for a person like me. Because at times, my thoughts and feelings about my self-image, often bereft of grace, have been overwhelming.

Not overwhelming for Jesus, though. Nothing is overwhelming for Jesus.

Sound vague and mysterious? That’s because it’s vague and mysterious to me too. At least, for the time being.

What I must remember as I begin my life over again: Jesus loves me.

Why am I beginning my life over again? My old life ended. It started to end a while ago. But when I had a miscarriage in May—yes, I had a miscarriage—everything accelerated until…The End.

And now, my new life begins.

For now, Malachi 4:2:

But for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in his wings. And you will go free, leaping with joy like calves let out to pasture.

Basically the healing had to do with self-condemnation. Even though we Christians are constantly told that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, most of us don’t experience that truth in our own hearts, so we go on condemning ourselves. And God told me that this is the message I’ve been given by other people my whole life: that “I’m wrong.” In other words, there is something fundamentally wrong with me, and everything about me is wrong, including the way I look, the way I think, the way I feel, and the way I act. This feeling of being wrong, or self-condemnation, has tormented me and led to a lifetime of endless efforting to make myself “right.” Well, God told me that Jesus made me right when He died for me on the cross. That anything that was wrong with me was nailed to the cross, with Jesus. The Lord told me this in a powerful encounter with Him, with the help of my amazingly gifted husband, who was praying alongside me. In that moment, I was forever healed of my wrongness, and I now know that I am right. That constant effort to fix myself—which has been with me my entire life, literally—has disappeared! I wish I could impress upon you how miraculous and incredible that is!! Only the Lord could rescue me from something that big and overwhelming. Thank God, Jesus is infinitely bigger than everything!!

Before

A friend of mine told me that the “nesting” instinct kicks in during a woman’s third trimester of pregnancy. I’m only in my first trimester, but I’m already feeling a serious urge to nest! I can’t do a thing about the nursery because I don’t know the gender of the baby yet, so I’m focusing on other aspects of the house. For instance, I’d like to start a small gardening project. Since I’m a total novice, I hope to start by planting flowers in planter boxes and pots. I bought a Southern Living gardening book that has been pretty helpful so far.

The next project I want to tackle is painting the living room, powder room, master bedroom, and finally, the nursery. (I wonder what Kevin’s doing for the next few weeks?) Then the other project I have in mind is sewing some pillows and blankets for the baby, though this will have to wait until I find out the gender. This sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? Well I figure I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands until the baby is born, so this is an amazing opportunity to nest to my heart’s content! With my husband’s help, of course! ;)

After

If I get discouraged in the upcoming weeks, I’ll have to remind myself of the awesome feat Kevin and I accomplished last summer. :) We laid down 14 pallets of sod to create a brand new front and back yard! Each pallet carries 2,000 pounds of sod. A friend helped out with a couple of pallets, but otherwise it was just Kevin and little ol’ me. Or, what I should really say is, Jesus laid that sod, because I have no idea how I was able to lift and lay down those endless, heavy slabs of sod in ninety degree weather in the middle of July! Thank you Jesus!

I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

Winter is pretty.

But just so you know days like this don’t necessarily appear out of nowhere, I want to share the past week with you. One day, about a week ago, I entered the pit. For some reason, I started to feel really awful about everything, and I regressed to my childhood ways. That is, I existed in a state of despair and didn’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. I stopped cooking, I stopped going out. I think I stopped showering for a few days too. I was feeling so dark and negative about everything, I was reminded of the person I used to be before I ever knew Jesus. Honestly, I didn’t know if I’d ever get out of this mood! I blamed it on my pregnancy, and I’m sure that had something to do with it, but I also think that God was giving me a severe pruning. Removing the dead parts of me, but only after allowing them to rear their ugly heads for a last appearance. But praise God, I’m feeling much, much better. Even some of my pregnancy symptoms, like my intense aversion to food, seem to have waned a bit. Thank God for that!

I want to encourage anyone who is going through a rough emotional period to hang in there. Very often, I find, these periods are a sign of a deep healing, where the Spirit of God is pushing out the unhealthy stuff so that He can reside fully in you. It’s actually a cause for hope, though I understand it doesn’t feel that way while you’re going through it. I also want to tell you ladies out there not to judge yourselves when you’re in the middle of a healing like this. Allow yourselves to be upset, validate your feelings. God is showing you the nature of your wounds, as an essential part of the healing process! After that’s over, you can let the Spirit cleanse you, be truly healed, and have a greater understanding of both the Lord and yourself! What could be better than that? Soon, you will be rejoicing!

Last thing I expected to see

Well, over the years my feelings started to change and I began to feel more open about having children. I still, however, didn’t feel an active desire to be a mother. Then finally last year Kevin and I broached the subject with more seriousness—time was running out after all, I was thirty-nine—and then began a tentative journey of trying to conceive. But all the while I was unsure of the decision and I knew my heart was not fully in it. Then one crazy day in September of last year, I was praying, and all of a sudden in my mind’s eye, God showed me a picture of a baby bottle out of the blue. I was so shocked, I literally gasped out loud. It was then that I knew that God wanted us to have a baby and that He was telling me that I, deep down, wanted to have a baby too. Kevin and I proceeded with our journey with confidence and assurance. The happy ending to this story is, in mid-February of this year, we found out we were pregnant! We were stunned, thrilled, and amazed at God’s faithfulness. And also at His timing. It couldn’t have happened at a better time for us, given the circumstances in our lives. I am now about ten weeks pregnant and I feel no fear at all, only peace and joy and excitement. Kevin, of course, feels the same way. We can’t wait to meet our baby!!!

I share this story to say that without Jesus, I never would’ve felt secure enough to get pregnant and become a mother. He had been working intensely on my heart for more than eight years before this happened. Without that relationship with Him, I would’ve been too damaged and afraid to ever allow myself to be a mother. I am so thankful to Him, for healing me in ways that touch every aspect of my life. He is truly my Savior and Redeemer, and I thank Him for this beautiful, precious gift of life He has placed in my womb!

Recently I met a woman who was filled with anxiety. In her mind, she understood certain facts about God, that He is good, faithful, and fully trustworthy. But in her heart, she didn’t actually believe these facts were true, so her heart kept communicating doubts to her mind. In the end, she was a “double-minded” woman who couldn’t put her trust in the Lord. As a result, she lived with constant anxiety.

In our present age, many people tend to focus on the intellect. We could even argue that many, if not all, of us seek to save ourselves with our minds. We use our minds to achieve goals, pursue happiness, even analyze theology, all the while neglecting our hearts. Somehow, we have come to believe that we can be happy with neglected hearts! We have allowed ourselves to become, as Scripture puts it, “hard-hearted.” And yet I believe this hard-heartedness is responsible for our repetitive negative thinking. A hard heart sends the same messages to the mind over and over again. It’s no wonder we experience lives of defeat.

Each of us carries around a broken heart. Of course, that’s understandable. Who hasn’t had her heart severely damaged by the people and events in her life? But once we know that we need to open our hearts to the Lord, it’s up to us to take that step, as frightening as it may seem. God is so gentle with our hearts, so surprisingly affectionate and sensitive, it’s worth taking the risk. What would the alternative be, anyway? A life of endless misery? The Lord has something entirely different in store for you. Nothing short of Jesus Himself living in your heart. Loving you, loving others. And a mind filled with His sublime beauty.

But lately I have been thinking a lot about my thoughts. Specifically, where I tend to put my mental focus. I realized over time that I have a habit of harboring negative thoughts, but I had never thought of them as negative because they were related to what I call “problem-solving.” When you put your mental energy into solving your problems, you tend to focus on bad situations that need fixing. Then your mind is consumed with negativity, but you only think that you’re fulfilling your responsibilities.

I’ll give you an example to illustrate. Let’s say you want to sell your current house because you’d like to buy another, nicer house. You put your house on the market and then ponder all the things you need to do to sell your house quickly. In the process, you constantly think about the fact that your house is sitting on the market, not getting sold. In other words, you obsess about your problem. You may even have 10,000 thoughts about it, or a lot more, depending on how desperate you are. Do you realize that when a person occupies his mind like this, the peace and love of Christ is choked out of him and his soul is instead filled with worry and stress? Then he is vulnerable to attacks from the enemy, perhaps in the form of bad circumstances or mental/emotional oppression.

Someone may object and say, Well what do you expect this person to do? Just sit around and do nothing? I’m not saying that, of course. You take the actions you need to take to handle your situation, but you don’t focus on the negative aspects of what you’re facing. Otherwise you prevent the Holy Spirit from working within you and you are then guided by your worries, which are fed to you by the enemy. I’m still not sure what taking our thoughts “captive” means (I tend to think of it more as yielding), but I do know that God wants us to release our worries, trust fully in His goodness, and rely upon Him to meet our needs. (See the oft-quoted Phil 4:6-7; go ahead and read verse 8 too.) This may all seem obvious, but really ask yourself: What do I think about all day? Do you even realize that very few of your thoughts are yielded to God’s control? If any? Ask God to speak to you about your thought life, and you may gain insight into why your life seems to be hitting a dead end.

Some people say that God won’t tell you something new until you do the thing He’s put in front of you. If you do that thing, then He’ll tell you the next thing. Though I dislike this word (because of performance issues), perhaps this is all about obedience. Could so many of us be living in disobedience to God? Why do I suspect that the answer is…Yes?

What is the thing that God has put in front of me? I know…this very moment. Am I obeying God this very moment? To me, obedience is a matter of faith. Do I have faith in God in this moment? Faith that His Son Jesus has wholly saved me from death and brought me over to Life? Or faith in this verse that so many of us love to quote?

For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand so we may do them.

Or I like this version better:

For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so that we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.

Jesus said we could move mountains if we had faith the size of a mustard seed. I don’t believe the problem is that our faith is too small. I believe the problem is that our “faith” is too large. There’s too much of us in faith. With faith in the Lord, nothing of us is involved. And only in that case can the tiny mustard seed do its work.

Letting yourself be nothing, so God can do His thing. No one can instruct you on how that happens. But I will say this: nothing means NOTHING.