The Twelve Days of Purpose
For a Purposeful Christmas
- Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power...
Happy Christmas Eve! By the time you read this, if you read it Christmas Eve day, we will be doing our traditional Christmas Eve rounds: First my adopted mom and her family, then off to George’s family. By the time we get home, I’ll be so ready for our bed! Grab your coffee and let’s stay in the moment here!
So we left off with Step 3, submitting our will/life over to our Higher Power and I shared transparently that that is easier said than done. Recently He downloaded an analogy for my life and for the lives of countless others and it has everything to do with these twelve steps as well as the various recovery curriculum I’ve seen over the years. See, these twelve steps were written in 1938, three years after Alcoholics Anonymous was formed, and are Biblically based. I could so go on an interesting detour here, but I won’t! It’s just this analogy has helped me understand why it’s taken me as long as it did to unpack the majority of my hurts, habits and hang-ups, aka, junk, and move about the cabin joyfully!
Here’s the download: For many of us, we have a clog in our pipe that leads to our heart. We are powerless over our habitual behavior and more often than not, unaware of just how far we are missing the mark. Many come to some sort of spiritual awakening through the steps as well as other forms of recovery, and 99.9 percent will tell you it’s a slow process. It’s not accomplished with a snap of the fingers and a tweak of the nose and presto, all those behaviors/habits/hang-ups are gone.
Why? Why can’t they just disappear? Because there is a clog in the pipe of understanding that leads to our heart and we can’t just cram Jesus down the throats of people without giving them something that explains why they do what they do, and to whom they do it, besides themselves! It took me seven years of therapy to even begin to scrape at the surface of His love for me. Does that mean I was a woman of little faith? Not at all; there was just some shadows over it, tainting it, covering it with untruths.
This is why this step is so important in our continued journey toward our Destination? Joyful! ™ aka, that abundant life that Christ died to give us! See, when we are willing to submit our will/life over to Him, our Higher Power, often, it will require a change of direction. With that change of direction will come a refining, a beating out of old habits, a grinding away of selfish desires, just like fine flour.
Oh, friend, I can so attest to this truth! I just wanted to write a book! It wasn’t until about ten months ago that I completely surrendered my will in the area of ministry. In other words, I’ve switched over to His track and left mine and am now on Jesus’ wild ride! Sometimes I think it’s the scariest roller coaster ever, and other times, the ride can be so smooth!
Anyway, let me give you a couple of principles to help you with this step:
• This turning over our will/agenda must be daily, hourly and sometimes minute by minute. You may even feel like you are white-knuckling it as you let go of some hurt, habit , hang-up, or even a hard feeling about someone else, but hang on and just keep claiming Jesus in the ride!
• “As we understand Him” is a bit mysterious, isn’t it? As I shared previously, my version of God in the beginning of my surrender was someone way up high, sitting on a throne playing Monopoly with my life. Maybe we should stop putting a physical picture to Him and begin our understanding with adjectives. My list may be longer than yours but here are a few: My understanding of Christ, my Higher Power, is He is loving, longsuffering, my provider; He is gentle, especially when the world around me is harsh. He is sovereign.
I can tell you, Coffee Hour Friend, that if you are turning your life/will over to Him, trust me when I say, He doesn’t want you running around like a crazy person, shopping as if it were your last day of life and charging up your credit card with a sky’s the limit attitude, buying gifts for people we don’t even like! Really?
Let’s finish our time with adding to our list of adjectives to describe how we understand or what we understand of our Jesus!
Joyfully,
Evinda
Christmas a year ago . . . with Bryden, our purpose!
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