Yesterday I got an e-mail about my
What ifs... post. As I read it I started to feel a bit of disappointment settle on my shoulders because the person had focused on something that wasn't really my point at all. When all of a sudden it hit me!
HARD!It is okay if seven different people get seven different applications from my writing. I am NOT the one in control of what comes out of these fingers of mine. I write what's on my heart. I write what God is walking me through, and HE applies it to your here and now. All of a sudden I realized that it is GOOD if someone comments on or highlights a point I never intended, because that shows me that God is working. And if I wrote in such a way that EVERYONE only got MY intended purpose, then not nearly as many people would be touched by the words on this site.
Then I started wondering... how much of the rest of our life is tinged by that? I read the book
Heaven is For Real this summer on the
badgering urging of my mother. She wanted me to read it because it gave her such real and vivid visions of what Heaven will be like. I read it, thoroughly enjoyed it, BAWLED like a baby through it, but almost none of my enjoyment and bawling had to do with Heaven. Almost none of my "Aha!" moments came from the parts about Heaven. You know what hit me? You know what ministered to me? The similarities of that family to Job. The way thing after thing after THING kept happening to them, and they kept plodding on. That's what hit me. See as I read that book, I
RELATED to their story. I could feel their pain. I know the pain of walking through the valley of
Chiari Malformation, financial destitution, moving FAR away from loved ones, my life FALLING apart, all within the span of a few short months. Therefore, I bawled like a baby because I felt I had found some kindred spirits, a story I could relate to, company in my loneliness. Was that the thesis of this book? Nope. Was that the story the authors aimed to tell? Nope. But guess what it was the part that hit ME.
The point of my writing, the point of our lives, the point of our ministry isn't OUR AIM... It is just simply that people are touched. It isn't about the message I am trying to convey. It is about the message that God is bringing home to each and every individual reader. This isn't MY blog. It is God's. My job is simply to write what is on my heart. It is His job to apply some part to your individual situation.
So go ahead... glean WHATEVER you want from this post... I'm just grateful that you glean.
We're so very guilty of assuming another person is exactly like us, especially in regard to spiritual things. But God works on us as individuals. I have friends who immediately stopped smoking when they were saved, because God convicted them so. Yet I have others who still smoke, mostly because God is working on other areas of their lives first. We need to let God work in each person as He sees fit. Sometimes it's hard to do, we want so much for other people to see what we see.
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