Whoa. Y’all. God has really been speaking to me.
I have had several prayers answered! I feel it is important to express believing my prayers have been answered is clearly a choice; there are alternative choices. (Like not believing, for example.) I am learning all over again about the power of my choices! I prayed for new customers, for the opportunity to share Rodan + Fields with more people. Well, I lost one customer, but I gained four! FIVE! Whoohoo! I have also met a lot of people who own their own businesses and I think it is great to make connections like that. So I am super excited. I have also set goals for myself. I shared them with my baby brother yesterday because I wanted to put it “out there.” But I’m not ready to post it here yet. 🙂
Time Scarcity though. I suffer from it. It has been my mentality. I realized this in a big way yesterday morning. Eleonora full of Love was resting in my lap, all chubby and cherubic, while she chugged her breakfast smoothie. I felt so at peace, and I just rested in that moment.
Sit……breathe…….quiet……peace.
Recently someone very wise advised me to just be present in the moment, to the fullest. I have been pondering that. What does that mean today? I’m a millennial. Sigh…..Ugh. No, rephrase that. It is true I spend a lot of time on my phone. I dislike this but have not found a way of accomplishing what I need without it. Or breaking my habit of it. Being present means ditching that phone A LOT more. It also means maximizing the time I do spend on the phone. I need to fiddle and putter less and treat my phone just like the tool that it is. I sat there and rested in that moment without my phone, enjoying the connection with my perfect and beautiful daughter, thinking about how I spend time. Time is money. I am learning that quite literally as I explore self-employment.
The lack of it has created a sort of desperation-driven impatience in my day-to-day behavior. I hear myself bark orders or sigh in exasperation more than I feel comfortable with. I realize that believing I never have enough time also creates a fear in me that I never have enough. I can’t get enough sleep, enough food, enough money, enough time with my son, enough time to write, enough time to create, to craft, to read, to listen to music. It has been an incredibly pervasive and subtle theme since I became an adult I think. When I became a mother that feeling of time-lack intensified! But recently it has been dissipating. Exponentially. I sat there feeding Eleonora and these thoughts were blooming in my heart as well as taking root in my mind! I started to smile and was just overjoyed because I knew it was the Holy Spirit talking to me. He has been liberating me from this prison of time scarcity. It was the prayer my heart did not even know I needed! I could just weep from thankfulness at his mercy and grace!
I have had three months of all the time in the world. It is my full-time job to stay home with Eleonora and Paxton. And Lucy the cat and Connie the dog. God gave me time so that I could learn to appreciate my blessings and see that there is absolutely no lack in my life. I have enough time, enough food, enough love, enough money, enough sleep. I have enough time to write, to craft, to create, to read, to spend time with my family, my daughter, my son, my lover and partner and teammate and better half. And bake! I have been baking bread like crazy! I love it, don’t ask me why. There is something so satisfying about smelling fresh bread…it’s warm and cozy and I feel God’s blessing like a warm hug to my soul every time I pull a steaming loaf out of the oven. It is truly daily bread.
I heard a message on the radio the other day. And God put it on my heart to give $50 to the radio station. I haven’t done it yet, but I will before the end of 2017. The speaker was talking about hypocrisy. How it comes from the Greek word hypokrite meaning actor. Actors in the ancient Greek plays would wear face masks on stage, so the audience would only see the facade of the character, and not the real person. So being a hypocrite merely means to be playing an act, wearing a mask. I have been guilty of this in so many ways, haven’t we all? And while I was listening to this I felt a conviction that staked me like a flaming knife right to the core of my soul. But at the same time there was this gentle nudge to my heart, so filled with Love and Mercy, and reminding me that conviction is holy. It is entirely different from guilt. I felt guilty too but more than that I just felt loved because I knew I was forgiven already. I wept in that redemption. Just me driving down the road, crying like a baby because of some random voice on the radio. Or was it random? I choose to believe it wasn’t. That’s faith, believing in things I cannot prove. I realized, again, that what God wants me to do is be genuine and authentic with all my relationships, that means my relationship with myself and especially with Him. I am learning more and more that being true to my own heart is actually being true to the Father, because he is in my heart already, so it is just another way to love the Father, and love myself at the same time. Let me rephrase. I am learning more and more that being true to the Father is actually being true to my own heart, because he is in my heart already and I am made in his image. I cannot explain all the tumble of emotion that happens when God talks to you like that. It hasn’t ever happened in my life before, but I also believe that seeds which have been planted in me my whole life long, are finally starting to blossom these last two years.
Then the next message came on the radio. There I was feeling like a sinner and they read this scripture:
“So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good fits to those who ask him.” Matthew 7:11 NLT
I totally spent money I did not have to buy my son the gift he wanted from Santa and to buy my daughter some new clothes! We also bought gifts (that we can’t afford) for other people in our family because we just want to bless them! And, money comes…and money goes, right? Why spend the holidays penny pinching when all year long we spend like there’s no tomorrow?? God gives so much I can’t even keep up with his goodness. I love that about Him!! I totally burst into more tears when this scripture was read on the radio! Just cried like a little baby! And I rejoiced too! The reader continued to say that we have not because we ask not and Father God wants to bless us, he wants to give us gifts. I cried and I sang and I said thank you Jesus as many times as I could because I realized, holy cow, that was meant directly FOR ME!
For years I have given in to the falsehood of time scarcity. I have believed that I didn’t have enough time to be a better person. And I’m not even a horrible person lol. I’m just human. When I say I felt like a sinner, I know it sounds so stereotypical and might turn some people “off,” but it isn’t even about the condemnation, hellfire, and brimstone. It’s the same feeling you get when someone you love so, so, so much looks at you with hurt eyes because you’ve let them down. It’s a painful regret that builds in your chest, knowing that you’ve been human and hurt someone along the way. I was so blessed and thankful that my very own Father spoke to me to tell me that he has gifts in store for me!! That as much as I love my two perfect little humans, he loves me more! And as much as I want to buy them everything nice in the world, he wants to give me more!
All of that happened in the car, listening to the radio. But I sat there holding Eleonora and cuddling her and I realized that I would not have received that blessing at all if I had not made the choice to believe that my prayers were being answered. If I did not choose to believe in God’s love, then maybe those five people would have supported my business anyway, and I would have thought it was pure coincidence or purely the result of my own efforts. And if I did not choose to believe then maybe what I heard on the radio would go in one ear and out the other. I might be wallowing in sorrow and guilt for not being “enough” or having enough.
You see, that is the beauty of the power of free will. I can choose to believe in God’s promises, or not. But how much impact does what I choose have on the outcome? Oh, and by the way, since starting this post I gained one more customer. That makes six. Six people in one month when I have gone an entire year with zero. Ha!!! That makes me want to laugh!!!!
It’s Christmas and I can’t keep up with his goodness. Can you?
The Water Pig 