Sometimes it amazes me how God will teach me something in the quietest simplest ways. Well, He was busy doing that today! Yes, I'm smiling at how slow I am sometimes. :) For quite awhile God has been trying to teach me the lesson of faith. It has gone through several levels Faith101 Faith102. I've lost track of the many ways He's seeking to teach me. Lately, the hardest lesson has been to trust Him fully with my heart. To allow Him to take away my deepest heart desires. To allow Him to let my vision and desire crash and burn and lay in ashes at my feet. It's out of these ashes that I've learned that my God loves me so much that sometimes He doesn't give me what I want or what I think He wants for me. Well, today God gave me a visual aid to my faith class. I went to visit my 88 (I think) year old Grandma at the nursing home. My Grandma has always been independent. She has been able to live on her own, do her own thing, and be independent for years. Last November she had to go to a nursing home because our family wasn't able to provide the much needed, intense care that she needed. It was a very difficult transition for my Grandma and one I'm not sure I would have handled well. For quite a few months she struggled with being in the nursing home. I watched her through the struggle and tried to help her through her desire to be elsewhere. Today when I went in to her see her I saw the former Grandma that I'd known. She was seeking to minister to those in the nursing home that were worse off than she was. She went down the hall talking to people calling them by name, smiling saying hello, stopping to help another lady pull up her blanket while she was quite wobbly in the process (scarring my mom and I to death) :). But in those few moments God gave me an illustration...my Grandma had given her desire to be out of the nursing home to Him and was seeking to serve Him where she was in the nursing home. Was I going to fuss at God for taking my dream? Was I going to pout and kick and scream because I didn't get what I thought God had promised me? Or, was I going to use every minute where he had placed me and do it cheerfully.
Thanks Grandma, I appreciate the lessons that you have unknowingly taught me. Thankful God has given me a Grandma like you!
2 comments:
Aw!I love your post. Makes me miss my Grandma! =( The Lord uses lots of different ways to teach us...many times we don't even realize when He's teaching us, but when we look back we see how much we really learned. I love you and I'm praying for you! =) And you look so much like your grandmother. I love the picture. It's so cute!
Hey Jolene! I love the lessons you can learn from everyday life! I hope you are doing well, we have not talked in forever! I have started a different blog about 2 years ago called Haley's Comment I though you might be interested in. If you get the time I'd love for you to take a look. It is http://www.haleydempsey.com/ . We need to talk and catch up sometime! -Haley
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