Posts
I have been fascinated to observe the different sources or locations from which people arrive on my blog sites. Even more interesting is to see that many times it is the pictures that I selected for illustrations that seem to attract people to look at my sites which is still a bit baffling to me. I have not figured out how people can track a link from a picture on the web to a blog that is utilizing that picture. I plan to do some more research and investigation into this soon.
I realize that I have not been writing nearly as often on this blog as I used to. There are several reasons for this. The biggest reason is that most of my thoughts and ideas have been absorbed by my nearly daily postings on my other blog site, deeperword.blogspot.com where I have been carefully meditating and analyzing how the Word of God applies to me personally. This emerges from my daily times early in the morning listening to God and marinating in the Word. Even then I sometimes have difficulty getting my thoughts posted regularly even after they are written because of my increased busy schedule. I often have to leave the house for work before I have time to edit and post what I have recored that morning and end up doing it later in the day. Sometimes they even pile up until the weekend when I have time to finish each one and back-post it to the day it was written.
And that is the second reason that I have had less presence on the web over the past few months on this particular blog. God has blessed me with the opportunity to have a good amount of work this summer with a friend that I met at the Barbershop chorus that I joined early this year. In the past couple weeks we have been working long hours on starting a new home for a customer that will have solid log walls around the house and log siding over the rest of the attached parts. In the past few days we built the garage and put the roof trusses and decking on. We hope to dry it in tomorrow before the rain starts that promises to last all weekend.
Another possible explanation for why I have not spent more time posting to this particular blog is possibly something I might call cyclic – whatever (can't think of a good word to fit here). It is just that there seems to be times when ideas tend to coalesce more often and become more persistent in their need to be processed and captured. But then there seems to be other times when life tends to get more involved in other directions and I wonder what is going on in this arena. But it is during these cycles that appear to be something like down times that I sense somehow that the things I learn during the more spiritually intense times are trickling down deeper into the heart level many times and much of the unseen absorption is taking place. I don't know if that makes any sense but right now it seems to be the best way I can explain it.
I have been requested to lead out in a Bible study class at church this coming weekend. It is the first time they have asked me to do anything like this even though I had previously asked to be involved more. They have tended to act almost afraid or suspicious of me in the past and I suppose that this may be a test of the waters so to speak to find out if I am “safe” to interact with others within the structures that currently are in place. Of course this all may be just my own imagination and lack of mind-sight on my part. I certainly have a lot of improvement in this area to gain.
I know that the notes I have prepared are far more than I could ever possibly have time to cover in the very short time alloted for the study. That is already very frustrating to me but I also must learn to be patient and to develop a much more settled level of trust with them before suggesting alternative ideas to deepen the level of people's interest in hearing God in His Word.
Much of my heart dialog is being expressed on my study blog as I mentioned previously. And even though it revolves around what I am currently observing in the book of Romans, what I am recording is almost always very personal and many times uncomfortably vulnerable. That has not come back to bite me yet as I was afraid when first beginning to blog but that is still a very real possibility. However, as I have revealed in previous blogs I made a decision sometime back that I want to be a more open and honest person and these blogs have been probably my main outlet for expressing my deeper emotions, frustrations, convictions, dreams and desires.
I suspect that as the weather changes in the fall and I find myself homebound more often due to rain-outs at work that I may cycle back into a mode of much more writing again. But most of all I intend to pursue my passion to seek God's face, to discover the feelings of His heart, to be much more sensitive to the voice of His Spirit and to be much more tuned to the promptings and impulses that are available to all those who are truly led by the Spirit of God.
With that in mind I sometimes have to restrict my desires to write to allow my heart to have the time and space to grow without being constantly under the scrutiny of my paparazzi left brain taking notes for its next writing stint.
I have been disappointed that such very few people who actually visit my sites are willing to touch base with me in this venue. But then I continually remind myself that this platform is not something I want to turn into a means for leveraging others or trying to manipulate what they believe, but this is a venue for me to simply express what I am experiencing deep inside. I still find it very difficult at times to share with others verbally what I find much easier to put into writing. And I also remember that God is in charge of all these venues and that the thoughts He shares with me and that I simply report in these posts really belong to Him and are not mine to claim ownership over. As such, it is His business if He wants to use what I post to be a seed of truth or a channel of encouragement for someone without any need for me to know how or where He is using this. My position is to simply rest in Him, express what He is doing in me – which is the real definition of a witness – and leave all the results in His hands.
This reminds me of the parable of Jesus that He gave in response to His disciple's request to have more faith. That story has remained in the back of my mind for a number of years ever since I saw its much deeper meaning. It was not so much the activities of the servants in that parable of Luke 17 that were important but it was the attitude and disposition that they had in relationship to their master that was the key ingredient of the story. God has many times reminded me that that is the direction I am to move toward and the closer I get to having that kind of relationship with Him the sooner I will have much more faith myself. With them I will be able to more honestly say, 'We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.' (Luke 17:10)
