Dwell in Me

Seeking God in the Every Day

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Five-Minute Friday: Red

Every Friday, Lisa-Jo Baker provides a prompt for “Five-Minute Friday“: Write for five minutes only–no editing, no rewriting. This week’s prompt is “Red.” Here goes . . .

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I had a friend with red sunglasses. She told me she couldn’t wear them very long without feeling angry. I thought, maybe blue sunglasses would be nice.

Perspective

And it’s true that we can’t control our circumstances, but we sure can change our perspective.

There’s a trick our pastor in Virginia taught. Look at your hands. Left represents the world. Right represents Christ. If you hold both in front of your face, one extended in front of the other, and open wide your fingers, you can look through from the close hand to the far hand. Do you view Christ through the lens of the world? Or, do you see the world through the lens of Christ?

When I was working at a job I loved for a boss who made me crazy, I wrote on a little post-it flag, “Check your perspective” and stuck it to my computer monitor. And at a bad moment, on a bad day, it helped to physically hold my hands up in front of my face for a minute and make a conscious decision about how I was going to view my situation.

Perspectives matter. How we view the world, how we view our circumstances, how we view our difficulties–it makes all the difference. It can change pain to joy. It can change grief to hope. And it can change a moment, a day, or even a life.

TIME

Five Minute Friday


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God’s Timing

Our church offers a mentorship program for women. It’s a six-month deal. You fill out a little card and they pray over you and match you with someone for six months of weekly meetings.

My mentor is wonderful. She’s been through infertility–though her experience was different. And she tells me I’m supposed to talk and she will listen. And she gives me advice. Godly advice.

We meet on Tuesdays at Starbucks near my house. I get a green tea latte. She gets green tea.

Recently, she said something that has changed my perspective.

She said, “You know this already, but this story isn’t just about you and [DH]. It’s about your future children and their spouses. And their children, and the circumstances that need to fit together.”

I didn’t know that already. That thought hadn’t crossed my mind.

And I thought about Sarah and Abraham waiting decades for the fulfillment of a promise. And who knows if they weren’t waiting until Rebecca was about to be born?

She is so right. There are millions of different things that need to come together for our baby to meet up with the right people, to be in the right place, to do the right things.

And what feels like ages is really just the slow ticking by of months. Of weeks. But one week might be the difference between meeting the love of his life and not. One month might be the difference between graduating high school at the right time or not. Who can know but God?

So now we pray a little differently. We pray “in Your timing” and mean it. And we are praying for the circumstances to come together, too.

Such peace for us from one little thought.