Nana Holds-From Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power

Welcome to Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power and thanks so very much for joining me, especially in the busiest season of the year! Grab your coffee and come back in for more of Nana Holds! I may keep you just a few minutes longer today so we can get through an incredibly important point, so make yourself comfy. I’m trusting that it will be worth your time!

A couple of blogs ago, I left off with a question about who was more blessed, the one who struggled less and had more, or the one who struggled more and had less? Well, I’d like to take this blog to answer that, which means I’ll be somewhat fast-forwarding to where we are emotionally and spiritually today, but it took several months to get here and I’m so glad I didn’t give up! See, in those first few months, I was still struggling with all the sacrificing and questioned why I had to go through all of this, why I had to give up my life as I had known it, my weekends and I didn’t feel very blessed. And although I was making the necessary changes, and sacrifices, my heart wasn’t quite in it all the way. All that has changed and I don’t want to give too much away but let me just share a couple of those life-changing revelations that have helped me to jump in with my whole heart!

When I was preparing for our November event titled “Living Outside Your Circumstance,” I realized then that He was allowing this and as long as I allowed Him to even with just a little piece of my heart, He would use it for something incredible. He showed me through a verse in John that the answer to living outside this circumstance, and any circumstance is actually within; that in order to get through it, and rise above it, we must acquire an eternal perspective to rise above our external circumstance. This is the verse: These things I have spoken to you; that in Me you may have peace. In the world, you WILL have tribulation but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world!

Well, the word tribulation got my attention and I was off and running to my Greek and Hebrew concordance and wow, what a treasure! Tribulation translates to “thlipsis” in Greek and primarily means “a pressing, pressure, anything which burdens the spirit and is often accompanied by anguish.” Hang on with me here because this gets better. So the root word for tribulation is actually a sort of sifting machine, a machine that goes and sifts the bad from the good by applying pressure!
There it is; the 10-karat diamond that sparkles with truth that shows us that circumstances/tribulations can work for our eternal good by sifting out the bad, separating it from the good, if we let them! Remember when I admitted that I saw myself as a not-so-kid-friendly Nana when this blog started? Well, I now know that He doesn’t want me to keep this perception, and through this circumstance and season, He’s going to separate the bad from the good and I will be transformed in the process to be more like Him, closer in His image.

Yes, most definitely, this circumstance, this tribulation has been working like a high-pressure sifting machine, cutting away the bad in me, unleashing me from a bondage I had no idea I was trapped in thereby bringing to surface the good. What’s telling about this is oftentimes, as soon as hardship comes our way, we automatically conclude, this couldn’t be from Him, and we begin to squirm and wiggle our way out, or scream our discontent and questions, shaking a finger at Him while hardening our heart.

When we ask why to a circumstance — and it’s okay to question, by the way — Jesus would have us remember that in a very real sense, Satan is temporarily in charge of this world and exercising squatter’s rights, and we all know that squatters don’t get to stay! Though it may look like the enemy is winning, GOD is the only one who can take the ugly pain, hurt, sorrow and any other side effect of our circumstance and turn it into something amazing.

In the meantime, don’t blame God for all the circumstances that you perceive to be wrong in your life; instead, look for an eternal good for your external circumstance, because when you take the X out of external, what do you have? So when I ask myself that question now, I can definitely look up and say, I am incredibly blessed for all I have gone through for He has used every bit of it to entwine my heart with His and I am humbled to know and realize just how much planning He has had to do on my behalf to get me where I am with Him and take me where I’m going, on my way to eternity!

I’d better let you go for now. Please join me on Monday for more of this journey of some of God’s most incredible sovereign multi-tasking skills ever displayed in my life.

Joyfully,

Evinda

Merry Christmas from our house to yours!