Perspective

I've never loved God like I love him now. To some that statement alone may seem selfish coming from a Christian, but it's true. I wasn't always a Christian, I didn't always believe God was real. I didn't always live my life right, I wasn't always saved, and even after I had gotten saved I still didn't always live my life right. I still sinned and for a while I still questioned God. I would always ask him "Why Me?" -I mean, why choose me of all people to carry out your message? Why would he trust me with doing what it takes to save the lives of other people when I barely feel like I'm saved myself? I don't believe I've ever written about the day I received my calling, so here it goes... It was a normal "wash day". Not the type of wash day spent washing clothes and cleaning the house. It was hair day in other words. The day I reserved every other week to wash and take care of my hair. This particular wash day I decided to roller set my hair. It was me, my snacks, my cell phone, and my book all under the hair dryer. It takes my hair about 2 hours to dry and about midway through the drying process, while reading my book everything went silent. I couldn't hear anything. You know how it feels when your ears are clogged with water and the sounds around you are muffled? Well it wasn't like that. Lol. It was like someone had just pressed mute on my life and I couldn't hear anything. My heart began to feel heavy, and I just felt like I wasn't in control of anything. I heard a voice say you will be a minister. I blinked and the sound came back. I immediately text my boyfriend and told him I had just received my calling. I said "Babe the weirdest thing just happened to me, I think I just received my calling!" It's amazing how God speaks to me. He speaks when I feel like I'm losing hope. It's like he's always there to reassure me that I'm not in this alone and he's always there looking out for me. That was my first time ever hearing from God. How did I know it was God? Hmm...who else can cause life to stand still while everything is still going on around you? Don't worry, I'll wait. See for weeks I had been praying and asking God to reveal to me his purpose for my life because I had felt like I was just going through the motions. He spoke when He knew I needed to hear his voice the most. I was going through a difficult time mentally. I had just moved out of my aunts house because of an offense and a horrible misunderstanding, I had no money, no transportation, and nowhere to go. I'd stayed with my cousin and slept on her couch. With the help of a friend and Gods grace I got a job and an apartment a couple of days apart. Within a matter of 3weeks I was back on my feet again. I was only about 6months into praise dancing for my church. I had no clue of what "the anointing" was and at this point in my life I was just dancing because a few of my boyfriends cousins found out I could dance and every time they saw me in church they'd say now you know you need to go ahead and start praise dancing. I had never praise danced in my life. I knew I'd feel like a fish out of water; but I was compelled to live my life for Christ and be of service in his kingdom, so I tried out and joined the praise dance team. I danced with no power for months and I wondered what was wrong with me. So when I received my calling I'm like, why me? I dance and I feel nothing. I mean it's fun and the church gets into it sometimes; but where's my anointing? Where's my power? How am I suppose to be changing people's lives and I'm just a regular person? God doesn't use the qualified, he uses the called. He called me to fulfill his purpose for my life and that was what I intended to do. I prayed day and night that the anointing will come over me so I won't just be a dancer or a minister, I'd be an anointed dancer and minister! I wanted so badly for people to feel the grace God had on my life overflowing from my lips when I spoke and from my body to theirs as I danced. I wanted to make a difference. So before I got to church in the mornings, on my way to church in the mornings, before and after I danced I'd pray in the spirit and ask God to fill me with his spirit so that I could minister to his people. Don't you know that God answers the prayers of the righteous! He answered my prayers. He changed my life and not only did I feel and acknowledge the change within me. My friends and family members recognized the change. My friend told me one day there's a peace about you; being around me (a once nervous wreck) brought them peace. Only God has the power to do that. I never loved God and appreciate His Grace like I do now. Last year I had the anointing, I was a living breathing example of Gods Grace and people were changing their lives because of it. I started getting emails and messages in my inboxes, people began to approach me and tell me how they can feel my anointing when I danced, my blogs were encouraging them and to keep living how I was living because I was beginning to change people's lives. I never realized how important it was to me to be used by God until now. Along the way I got caught up in me. Not in the sense that I feel I'm better than people; but in the sense that I began to feel I had to live perfect. The pressure of being that person to help save people's lives began to feel like it was too much. I knew it was selfish of me to think this way. I wrote about how I was feeling and I was too ashamed of exposing how selfish I was I never posted them; but I'm human. We make mistakes. The number one mistake I made was forgetting that I no longer was living for me. It's not about me. My testimonies, Gods Grace, my life isn't for me, it's for God. It's to be an example. My purpose is to serve God and be a vessel for his people. I wasn't called to be perfect. It's because I'm not perfect that he decided to use me. Only a person who really loves and cares about you will bless you with that type of responsibility. Only the God of love will turn my life around -the life people spread rumors about and talked about me behind is now being used in a way that will bless the lives of Gods people. My God. I love Him for that and because of his love for me I will never lose focus on what matters most again...it's not about me, it was never about me. Love God he loves you too! God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored. But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s! So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go! This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him! That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens. All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy. Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good. God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun. So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture: They kill us in cold blood because they hate you. We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one. None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us. (‭Romans‬ ‭8‬:‭3-39‬ MSG) Love, ChelCy

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