Life Unexpected

Yesterday I was sitting in worship when we sang these words, "my heart and my soul...I give you control...consume me from the inside out, Lord."  It's not unusual for us to sing songs and not really give thought to what we are singing.  It's not something we are proud of (to sing without thinking about what we are actually saying), but the reality is that we often come into worship preoccupied. Preoccupied. Sometimes we are preoccupied with what happened the week before, what is going to happen in the upcoming week, what we are going to eat for dinner, who is playing football, whether our hair is sticking up, whether we look nice enough, what our neighbor is doing, whose baby is crying in the back of the church, how we would love a Medium Pumpkin Coffee cream only from Dunkin (ok...so some things can't be helped).  The bottom line is far too often we come into worship "preoccupied," and we forget who we are there for and just how powerful the

I have always struggled with seeing myself as enough.  If I look back on my life, I am not even sure where that struggle emerged from.  I grew up in a home where my parents poured out love on a daily basis, reminded me that I am a person of value, encouraged me along the way in all that I chose to do, and often reminded me of the things that they saw in me that I often could not see in myself.  I have tried really hard to surround myself with friendships that do the very same thing.  I have tried to do what Brennan Manning writes about in his book, Abba's Child, " To define myself as one who is radically beloved by God and allow that to constitute my self worth."   But the reality is, to love myself, to see myself as valuable, to see myself as "enough" in this competitive world, has been something I have continued to battle out in my daily life. This past June I received a phone call that I had no idea was coming.  We were away for Nate's first official