Friday Night Ramblings

Sundays Ultra
Originally uploaded by Escape Vehicle.

This must be what settled feels like.

Here I am on a Friday night (payday Friday where the traffic in Manila is always a nightmare...) in front of my PC, blogging and nursing a migraine (hormonal) while L devours Pokemon in the other room. H and P are out for their usual daddy-daughter night and everything in my world is quiet and perfect - migraine notwithstanding.

It's been a great and blessed week. A Migi's Corner project at the PGH won a special award from the Rotary Club and a ministry that H and I will be launching in August has finally gotten our church's blessings. P and L have adjusted very well into the new school year and are balancing sports and schoolwork beautifully thus far. Simple joys but these have become to me the most important and central things in my life - God and family. SO, this is how settled feels.

My bedtime reading nowadays is a book called "When Life and Beliefs Collide" - How knowing God makes a difference. A passage that I read last night really resonated with me throughout today - "It is in the trenches that we learn it is never enough to know about God in our heads. We must know him in our hearts. That happens when we are forced to trust God in perplexing circumstances. God's sovereignty is far more than a fascinating idea. It is a truth that transforms a woman's life."

Over the last few months I have often wondered at some of the changes that have taken place within me. Like a force that I can't control. The things I have become passionate about are very different from what they were a year ago. The essentials remain - writing, children's advocacy, grief studies - but have taken on a differerent dimension. Take writing for example. I prefer now to do work that is truly of service. Writing that pleases God and not man. I wish to use this gift to help bring other women to a keener awareness of self and of God. And I find that He really equips me for the work that he wants me to do. Transforms. That's what he does when you turn your life over completely to Him.

How did I get to this point? I suppose it came after many "dark nights" of the soul. I guess it came when I decided to shift the focus from myself and turn it all over to HIM. One's attitude towards love, life, relationships and work does a 180 degree shift when you know that you live it for an audience of One. Everything unto Him who keeps an eye on you 24/7. And I don't do it out of fear. I do it, because it pleases Him. But it's not easy. I'm only human and I slip every now and then. But it's easier to catch myself now and when I do, I just go back into His flow and move on.

So tonight I am in bliss. I do not miss my former life at all. I revel in the simplicity of where I am now. Tapping away at this pc and creating this entry quiets my heart. And the peals of laughter in the next room is the most beautiful sound in the whole world tonight.