As humans we were made for love and connection and to be acknowledged. The other day I got my little 13 month old up, I fed her food, I gave her water, and then I plonked her down to play but I hadn’t actually cuddled with her and talked to her and loved on her and within a few minutes she was quite grizzly.
Apparently she just needed to climb up onto my lap, snuggle with me and tell me a sentence in baby language of complete waffle but once she had been heard she was quite happy to go and play.
It reminds me of a story of one of the old French Kings who wanted to do an experiment about love so he took a bunch of orphaned babies and kept them in cribs. Their needs were attended to, they would be changed and fed but never spoken to cuddled and eventually each one of them died.
There’s this prayer in Ephesians about God strengthening us to receive His love that we would know the height and the width and the depth and we would have Supernatural strength to perceive it.
I pray all sorts of Scriptures about all sorts of other things but for some reason it never clicked in my head to actually pray this. Sometimes we wonder what prayer will actually do, yet I know it does things because I’ve seen it, I just never thought to pray it to be strengthened to receive Gods love, but that’s what He says we need.
So we start praying to be strengthened to receive Gods love and then we just start writing scriptures out about Gods love to lay a foundation.
Pastor @katherineruonala has these beautiful prayers on Spotify in an album called Prayers of his People that are beautiful to play at night to allow it to sink in.
WE WERE MADE FOR LOVE
Have I often felt anxious, worried, or fearful that the worst would happen to me and my loved ones? My friend, these negative, exhausting emotions are merely flags that indicate what we truly believe about ourselves, our lives, and God.
When we are fearful and worried all the time, we are living as if we don’t believe that we have a strong and able Shepherd who is tenderhearted toward us, who only leads us to good places, who protects us and lovingly watches over us. So if worrying or being fearful seem to be your natural default, what you need to do is to keep hearing and learning about how much God loves you and how precious you are to Him. The more strongly you believe this – the more this truth gets a hold on the inside of you – the more it will change your thoughts and feelings and the less you will fall victim to unhealthy emotions. – The Power of Right Believing
WHAT I AM NOT SAYING, is that you shouldn’t eat healthy, take supplements, exercise etc, but if those things aren’t working, than we need to examine our thoughts, and often it’s a combination of the two.
After I had a miscarriage in late 2019, I got very, very sick but even after I got better, my thoughts and even what I would say about myself were very negative and I realised I had to start addressing my thoughts.
I remember this story from Joseph Prince’s book, The Power of Right Believing, of a chaplain who went to work with the inmates of a mental hospital who were nonverbal and violent, locked into the attic on the top floor with food pushed through a slot in the door a few times a day.
He didn’t know what to do, where to start?
The Holy Spirit led him to just sing Jesus Loves Me, over and over. Over a period of weeks, the room calmed, people began to come back into their right minds and speak again. I can’t remember whether it was by the end of the year or within a few years, almost all of them were released.
Yes, I believe in medical & chemical imbalances, & that medication can help, but obviously it wasn’t helping those guys or they didn’t have access to it? It’s just a powerful example of understanding on a deeper level, God’s love for us
Another thing we were made for is vison . . . and thereby work
These thoughts started coming together when I was hanging clothes, how they just dry in the breeze, they don’t have to try, they just get hung out and dry, how dishes soak in a sink, they don’t try, they just soak . . . that seeds don’t try they just grow, even our body is made to heal itself, and that if it is natural for these things to happen, what are we made for, and yet we have the unique position being able to dream.
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10
He has placed dreams and talents inside each one of us, and I guess it’s why when those things are affirmed and even called out by a prophetic word, it awakens so much life and hope in us; because we were made for it. . .
He’s awakening the hope in me, by calling forth my destiny . . .
A quote from Lisa Bevere’s book Fight Like a Girl: Vision is a powerful agent for awakening destiny.
My thoughts have run together in poetry . . .
We were made for vision, we were made for love,
We were made for rest and we were made to work
We were made for duty, and that not to shirk
If we were made for vision, and we were made to work,
And we were made for duty, than why does it irk?
To have be diligent and disciplined to succeed,
To not just have an idea but it see it achieved . . .
We love to see the work of our hands, a quilt made,
Paper arranged and a scrapbook displayed,
A recipe served in delightfully upon a plate.
We were made to create.
The little steps we make to brighten up our yard,
And plough up ground so it will not be hard,
All build towards the vision that’s been placed in our heart
Dishes soak in a sink and are easy to scrub,
And clothes dry easily in breeze or sun, on a line or shrub.
Why is it this way, we stop and see, Divine design
In every day, with the passing of time.
For we were made to create, and love, and work,
And so I lean into that place, for when you are made to do something
We must push in and push through to see what joy it will bring.
Sometimes we get discouraged.
The dream we have seems so big, so hard to get to.
And in the middle of everything we lose the steps to get to it.
But so often they are little steps.
When we were trying to start a business alongside Stephen’s full time job so that one day he could transition to working from home full time, it was little steps.
God led me to do a Bible Study on discipline and diligence.
We couldn’t just go find a shop and set up immediately, it was a process of creating a product in spare time instead of watching rubbish on YouTube, it was consistently going out to the shed instead of having fun every weekend.
It was keeping our spaces tidy so that could think clearly.
It was saving money and investing spare cash into tools, not toys.
It was lists of jobs and things to accomplish.
And none of it was to an excess; keeping in mind Proverb 23:4
