#Developing a Relationship with Jesus

[inherpower]

Where is the love?

I have a deep yearning to know and feel God’s love. I’m in an interesting season in my life. There are some relationships that I have upheld as a form of identity for myself and through those relationships I have loved as deeply as I knew how to. All of those relationships have transformed and no longer provide the same sustenance that they once did. I’m being broken down, my sense of identity completely shattered. It’s as if God has inserted himself into my life and decreased my interactions, changed my heart posture so that all I could do was come to Him. In reading 1 John 4:7-21, John tell us that God is love and when we love, we know God.

"We love because he loved us first"  -- 1 John 4:19

But what if you’re view on love and how you were giving and receiving love gets damaged? I find myself having to start fresh and go back to square one, learning what love truly is and is not. I often tell a story of how back at the start of 2020 (before the pandemic hit) I shouted to God at the top of a mountain saying that I am ready to be who HE created me to be. My life utterly broke down after that prayer. In fact I’m still clearing out the rubble as I write this. God stripped me of all perceived safety and security in anything that was not Him. Now I spend a great amount of my time praying and allowing God to rebuild me. This hasn’t been easy. If you are married, a parent, an exalted child, a person of status in your career, imagine that position or title that you hold most dear being adapted into what God desired for you, not the other way around.

One thing I’ve asked God in the past and I’ve heard other people ask is why would God allow for a certain situation and circumstance to happen? God broke it down. Bear with me. At times we get ourselves into situations that weren’t even what God wanted for us in the first place and then we ask why He allowed it to happen. God gave us free will. We made those decisions of our own volition. In fact God loves us so much that He will often send us a messenger telling us hey, that might not be the direction you wanna go in and we may get defensive and push back on that message and say that WE have a right to choose. And if the situation or circumstance that we may be getting into is really bad, God many send a messenger multiple times in many different forms. So why be mad at God? 

Yeah I know it’s a hard pill to swallow but the beauty is that we can come to Him when it all comes down and He will rebuild us and set us on the path that He designed for us. When I asked God to come into my life He cleaned house. All that I had known, believed and stood on was dismantled. Initially I called out to God asking why. Why was I being punished? To make matters worse I had to be silent and not clap back or defend myself when I wanted to. In rare moments when I was crying and pleading to take action He would tell me Do nothing. Say nothing. Let me take care of it. It took some time but He calmed my storms. My conversations with God turned into prayers then they turned into praise. A situation would come along and try to knock me off my square and I started thanking God for His love and protection. I may have been rattled for a bit but I got back to center and grounded myself in God’s love.

So back to what I was initially presenting in regards to my relationships. In each realm of my life (family, friend, self) God has revamped my relationships to show me how loved I am. And for the relationships that still need some work, He has set them aside and is taking care of them on my behalf. While He does that I lean into Him to nourish me. That’s all He’s ever wanted is for me to come to Him so that He can wrap himself around me and remind me that I am loved. There is a verse that has been my beacon of light when it comes to love. When you have a chance read all of Ephesians 3:14-21 but I will share the parts within this larger text that I rest on.

"...that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."  -- Ephesians 3:16-19 ESV

I’ll come back to this passage in another post and dive deeper into this cause it’s so good. But I want to end here with this and let you meditate on these words.

[cha-lii]

the s4 stancy storyline makes me so god damn mad

[peapod20001]

David knows just what to say 💕 (even if he has no confidence in the words coming out of his mouth)

[ember-not-amber]

I think I’m legitimately going crazy bc this is the 5 millionth time I’ve seen a Cody Ko supporter comment sth along the lines of “so glad he’s back, I needed sth to watch while I eat lunch” MY BROTHER IN CHRIST DO YOU ONLY WATCH ONE YOUTUBER?!?? DO YOU NOT GIVE YOURSELF ANY OTHER OPTIONS FOR CONTENT TO WATCH WHILE YOU EAT?!?!? IS IT INSANE THAT I AM SUBBED TO MULTIPLE YOUTUBE CHANNELS SO THAT I CAN GIVE MYSELF DIFFERENT OPTIONS OF WHAT TO WATCH DEPENDING ON WHAT I FEEL LIKE WATCHING?!?!?

[vaniliens]

I dont think ive ever actually said it before but all things considered the entirety of the Fairy Tail manga is so impressive,, published for a whole decade from 2006-2017 with barely if any breaks, released WEEKLY with consistently pretty and Improving art, theres like a million characters and somehow a good chunk of them are pretty fleshed out for side characters, the arcs never felt like it was redoing / recycling something & they progressed in intensity pretty successfully somehow?? Youd think for a decade running manga with 545 chapters thered be an arc that fell off but like not really??? Alvarez had a lot of problems but it was resolved satisfyingly & it called back to the main theme of friendship & family. Also it didnt end with everyone getting together and having 30 kids.

[not-so-superheroine]

Since it's not going in my article due to space constraints, i'll share a bit about Jane Manning James here. It won't be superfleshed out atm bc it got cut. I plan to do more later. As I am *Reorganized*, writing this for a Community of Christ publication, i researched Ld-S shared history to the point of Nauvoo. my article doesn't follow west (technically). the main resource was an LDS one (thank you v much for your freely available archive) asking about her time with the prophet of the Restoration.

Jane Manning James

A significant Black Latter Day Saint from the early church was Jane Manning James. A woman from Connecticut notably made the walk from Buffalo, New York to Nauvoo, Illinois on foot, with most of her family. This was only after being separated from the group of recently converted latter day saints in Buffalo, possibly due to their race. Jane was baptized in 1842 by missionaries in her home state of Connecticut. She recorded these things about her journey and arrival to Nauvoo and her faith when asked to recall her life living with Joseph Smith in 1905.

“When I went there [Nauvoo] I only had two things on me, no shoes nor stockings, wore them all out on the road… They [Joseph and Emma] was looking for us because I wrote them a letter. There was eight of us, my mother and two sisters and a brother and sister-in-law, and we had two children, one they had to carry all the way there, and we traveled a thousand miles.”

She was sure in her belief of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Modern Prophecy. She says in her recollection, after seeing that Joseph Smith Jr was indeed the man in her vision in Connecticut, that “This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and there will never be any other on earth. It has come to stay.” Sister James would later go west with the saints under the leadership of then Apostle Brigham Young.

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me tumblr posting again:

thank you for the example set Sister James on faith, dedication, and perseverance. She also had spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongue and faith healing. She believed following the gospel, knowing it was a key to a better way of living life (for her.) it wasn't easy for her, and yet, i think the faith community i observe today (and mormonism in general) is better, just for her having lived it.

may she be at peace, and in a manner God, Sister Jane herself, and her family she led that meant so very much to her, see fit.

[writethestory365]

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[tamarin-opal-eyed]

OOP Tam's a bun now! Long story, will put in the tags, but aside from an adjustment in name/backstory/colors, she's still the same grump.

[inherpower]

Love is patient, love is kind. Love is God

I can’t tell you the exact date or month when I stopped drinking alcohol, but I’m certain it was in 2019. Most people would commit such a huge milestone to memory but I knew I didn’t want to memorialize a time that was marked with so much pain. That’s not to say that I miss alcohol. The pain was multifaceted. I spent years of my life using alcohol as a way to anesthetize trauma from my childhood but inadvertently I ended up causing pain to my loved ones through my drinking. Which in turn brought about the pain from shame and guilt. I knew that I shouldn’t be harming myself in such a way but I repeated the dangerous cycle again and again for years. Then there was the pain of quitting, which wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I had already reached a breaking point where my back was up against the wall. Fortunately my drinking hadn’t gotten to a point where I lost my job and my family but I lost enough of myself that I was beginning to crack. I can honestly say that God was with me during this time because there is no other explanation for the absolute hard stop. Through I did have moments where I felt lured by the mere camaraderie of drinking with others, the desire to drown my sorrows in vodka was no longer a battle.

This was also a pivotal time as it was sandwiched in between two very important flash points that I cannot gloss over. Some months or maybe a year prior, I was lying in bed crying to my then partner lamenting over the fact that I did not know who I was. A sudden rush of an identity crisis came crashing down and I was struggling to find me. Then after I stopped drinking I was hiking in the hills of Oakland California in early 2020 (right before the pandemic) and yelled out to God from a peak that I had climbed saying I’M READY! MAKE ME THE PERSON THAT YOU CREATED ME TO BE LORD! 2020 was also the year I turned forty and this was crucial since I had prophesied at a young age that thirty, more importantly forty, would be when my life would get progressively better (yeah imagine an eight-year-old child wide eyed about turning forty…crazy). Remember that crack I talked about earlier? Well it would be around this time in my life when those cracks started to give way and I became completely undone.

I was in therapy finally addressing old wounds that I had been running away from for so long. And while this was one of the most difficult times of my life due to the internal changes and rupturing that I was experiencing, I was confident that it would all be worth it and I would come out on the other side healed, shiny and new. Fast forward to today and I felt that rupturing again. There are many new yet familiar things in my life that are cropping up and the one difference that is crucial to note is that I’m not drinking. I know I’m repeating the drinking thing but you have to understand how much of a crutch this was in my life. Work getting on my nerves? Drink. Celebrating something great!? Drink. Trying to be social and engaging with people? Drink. Chilling at home watching tv and just glad that I made it through the week? Drink. But the most important reason for my drinking was to keep everything else out and keep me locked in. Truth be told I hated the taste of alcohol, but once I got past that first or second (sometimes even third) gulp, then I was good. I felt as though I needed vodka and wine to hide from the pain and create a happier, more tolerable avatar that people could like, maybe even love.

In hindsight I recognize that I have a tendency to identify myself through the lens of pain. It wouldn’t be until years after that pivotal moment when I stopped drinking that I began to untether myself from pain. Not to say that I was making a commitment to never feel pain again (that’s impossible) but rather to begin the process of stripping away the narratives that I had painted on myself. Narratives such as being dirty, unholy, spoiled rotten and an all around bad kid. There were other narratives of being an orphan, unloveable, unworthy and damaged goods. I believed that everything I touched died, disintegrated or disappeared. I was able to quiet these narratives through alcohol. So when I sit here, type these words and tell you that I’m in a new state of rupturing without alcohol, without edibles or shrooms (yeah I went there) or even my favorite drug of choice…distraction, I’m forced to look at my life through a clearer lens.

When you see everything through pain it’s hard to see the joy and the good in life. Pain also gave me the false notion that love was unable to be alive within me. Trauma caused me to guard myself, put up walls, barriers, blockades, blinders, moats even around not just my heart, it extended out at least six feet from me. And good luck trying to get in cause those walls were so thick that they were impenetrable. Oddly enough I did my best to pour love out to any and everyone I came across. But because I didn’t know love for myself, I wasn’t really able to give love to others. And as long as I was looking at life through those pain colored glasses, I wouldn’t know how to truly open myself up to the full essence of love.

About a month ago I got baptized. This was an act that I felt was important to me, something that marked a change that started percolating within me just weeks prior. While I had a connection with God, I never had a relationship. And now I wanted to not only know God but feel the fullness of His love for me. Listen, opening up to love can feel terrifying because there’s always the risk of being hurt. But hurt comes even when you’re blocking yourself from the very thing that you’re trying to avoid. Sometimes the hurt is even worse because the rigid stance that we have to brace ourselves for the impact of hurt makes us more brittle and the propensity to crack is greater. I would be insane to think that I could somehow avoid being hurt or hurting someone else, that’s just not realistic. But avoiding pain means that I’m avoiding love, and that is a risk that I’m no longer willing to take.

[argonautsoul]

This is the price of hypocrisy: a faith that is rotten at its core, a church that loses its soul while pretending to save others. And the only way forward — the only way back to anything resembling the gospel — is not in doubling down on empty moralism, but in tearing down the systems that protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable.

Jesus Preaching on the Mount — Gustave Dore

But before you pick up your stones and begin to hurl them at the church, the system, the institution… everyone else, just remember one thing:

society is just a reflection of who we are.

It is always convenient to look for an excuse or scapegoat for problems within which is more an issue with a lack of accountability, responsibility, respect, and honour.

Blaming the tool distracts from the real problem, and eliminating the tool will do nothing to cure the disease.

The problem is that blaming anything in the external for our problems is like blaming a mirror for how we look.

But who needs serious introspection when such a convenient target of blame exists?

It's not Christianity's (or religion's) fault that individuals (human beings) are driven by an insatiable desire for more — more income, more wealth, more possessions, more recognition, more influence, more power, more sexual opportunities, more privileges, more attention, more pokemon cards, more of anything good — regardless of the consequences.

We measure success by finishing in first place, making it to the top of our game, and having better toys than our neighbours. We value instant gratification by encouraging people to consume rather than to save for a rainy day — people borrow money to prove that they live large. We idolize people who drive expensive cars, wear the latest fashions, and live in luxurious homes. We promote narcissism, greed, and the separation of effort, dedication, and discipline from success. We encourage people to be never satisfied and to strive for more.

The competition is relentless, and if you underperform compared to the rest, followers sponsors, donors, investors, invest their attention and money elsewhere where the returns are higher.

Greed has many faces and is manifested in many ways. As individuals, we make choices about our own activities, and we all help perpetuate the addiction.

Breaking free from the grip of greed is a journey that requires self-awareness, reflection, and ongoing effort.

Make sure you have enough to look after yourself and your loved ones, but if you have the capacity for more, please consider sending the elevator back down.

.

"If our Christianity causes kids to go hungry, the sick to go without healthcare, the stranger to be unwelcome, the elderly on social security to be called a "parasite," all while billionaires get richer, we've profoundly misunderstood the most basic elements of Jesus' teachings." - Rev. Benjamin Cremer

[2-244]

Still, I Believe: When Faith and Feeling Collide

Obviously, blind faith has blind in it for a reason. You’re just supposed to let go and let God. And I have that. I do let go. I trust that the world works out. I believe—fully—that God is on my side. But sometimes I wonder… when does it become a clash? A collision between blind faith and human emotion? Am I going against God because I feel hopelessness? Because I feel anxiety? Because I’m…

[peaofme]

The Unspoken: A call for Reflection

I see the way you communicate, subtly undermining me and making me feel less than I am. It feels as though you’re trying to position yourself as more intelligent or capable, but in reality, your behavior reveals a deeper issue. Nearly four years have passed, and despite my efforts to support you and give you the space to grow, you’re still displaying the same level of immaturity. I wanted to…

[sendforthyourword]

We will be live on the Air soon and if you would like to listen or show you can dial into the show and use our chatroom to leave a message for our host and co host.

[eternityinview-posts]

Trust, Worship, and Joy: The Path of Delighting in the Lord

Earlier this year, I went through a difficult set of circumstances and am still trying to navigate the course of my life in the wake of that trial. But through it all, my faith never faltered. God used my church, family, and friends to teach me that He has my back. This morning, I read the following promise of God found in Psalms 37:23-24 (NIV) that resonates with my experience going through…

[wholehear-ts]

[galaghiel]

finally ended this stupid bastard holy shit. nearly an hour of chasing and dodging and crying and pain.