Create More Space for God
Last post I talked about creating space for connection with God through participating in various spiritual disciplines. Today I want to share with you another way to experience God in our ordinary lives. Like the other spiritual disciplines this practice requires us to leave a gap/place for God to show up and work on our behalf.
Isn’t it true that sometimes our life plans do not go the way we hoped or anticipated? We have certainly experienced that with the Covid-19 but it has also been true before the pandemic. Such occurrences are just a fact of life. We have all made plans and watched them collapse around us, and sometimes no fault of our own. But how do we react to those disappointments? Do we give up, blame others, act out, get bitter, curse God or take it out on those closest to us? There is another way to think and respond when life throws us a curveball and we face another difficult situation. It is a spiritual discipline of serenity.
Think of the story of Joseph in Genesis 37-45. Here is a guy who just couldn’t get a break. His 10 brothers sold him into slavery because they were jealous of him. In Egypt Joseph thrived working as a servant for a family until falsely accused of attempted rape. He was wrongly thrown into prison. While in prison Joseph made the most of his situation and after many long years of imprisonment was released. While free God continued to bless Joseph and gave him a powerful position as prime minister of Egypt. It was from this position that Joseph was able to eventually confront and forgive his brothers who sold him into slavery and declare that although they meant it for evil, God meant it for good. Life was not fair to Joseph. But Joseph learned to control what he could, his attitude. He practiced serenity and courage when life was not fair. And this made space for God to work on his behalf.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” Yep serenity is a spiritual discipline, an attitude mind-set that allows us to accept reality, courageously do the next right thing and trust God to do what’s best.
Announcements:
- If you are in need of prayer, please send your prayer requests to CelebrateRecoveryatCrossroads@gmail.com and we will forward those on to our celebrate recovery prayer team. The Crossroads Church Prayer team would also love to pray for you, so when you send your E-mail, please note if you are okay with us forwarding your prayer request to the church.
- Fridays at 6:30pm, We are hosting "CR Friday Night Live." To subscribe to our youtube channel please click on the following link and select the subscribe button. CR Youtube Channel Link . There will be a song or two of worship and then a short recovery based dialog between a couple of CR members. This will be streamed on youtube.
- Fridays we will be hosting on-line open share group meetings at 7:30pm. There will be one mixed issues group for men and one mixed issues group for women. Men's Open Share Group Sign-Up Link / Women's Open Share Group Sign-Up Link. These meetings will take place using the Zoom App. In order to participate you will need a tablet, smart-phone or computer with camera. In order to ensure confidentiality of these meetings everyone who participates will need to find a private room to set up, have their camera on, so others can see that there is no one else in the room and they will also need to wear a pair of headphones so that they are the only ones that can hear. This is a free app and you can download it on google play, apple app store or through your web-browser on your computer. For help on how to join a Zoom meeting please click on the the following link, which will take you to their support web-site Zoom Set-Up Help
James U.
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