Option Number Two Please

Our God is so good!

In the past year of my life, I have felt the increased pressure from God to challenge my own identity and question what I believe. In this year, God has blessed me with people to push buttons and ask the questions that I was not strong enough, or didn't even know how to ask myself. These questions have been sharpening and pruning my faith and strengthening me like nothing I have even known. I am very thankful for those people because through them God has empowered me to start recognizing those challenges directly from Him. And today I have felt that challenge full force. In the midst of my day today I sat down and journaled about the topic of beauty and identity. I kept hearing the question again and again in my head, "where do you find your beauty Jennifer? In me? Or these worldly treasures?"

This question has been plaguing me for the past week because my IPhone sadly died last week. Yes, you may be laughing reading this (possibly on your own personal IPhone) but think about it...how much reliance and faith do we put on worldly things? Using a phone that functioned for text messages and calls made me realize how much importance the world today focuses on material possessions. As I walked into the AT&T store to shop for a new phone that could "do it all" I kept asking myself, "do you really need this?" It saddened me to think that so many people live through technological interactions such as texting or e-mails and lack the every so simple and so meaningful human face-to-face interaction. I know I am stretching this analogy pretty far in saying this but that is one of the ways people in this world create an identity outside of an identity in Christ. By finding earthly things to latch onto and claim to make them into something.

Finally, tonight while reading through chapter 27 with a group of loving friends, Darrel stated, "When you join "the great and the small" and stand before the great white throne, and God asks you, 'Why should I let you enter the new city, the new heaven and the new earth, and not cast you into the lake of fire?' what will you say?" (357) I pray and I hope that God continues to work out in me, and in all of you friends, and all of the world around us, how to take the second option and "take our stand on the basis of what Jesus Christ has done with his life" as our identity instead of taking "our stand in what we have done in with our lives."

Because our God is good. SO good! "And look! A throne. With someone sitting on it. The throne is not vacant. The throne is not up for grabs. Many have tried to take it from the One who sits on it, but none have succeeded. None will succeed. None CAN succeed." (348)