Not sure if you have this habit, whenever it's year end, I will normally spend quite some time thinking about what had happened throughout the entire year, and my prayer topics for the coming year. It's our tradition to share our new year prayer topics each year, but it has slowly become part of me to do so. The prayer topics for the coming year are very important, because they set the blueprint for the year and no matter what happen in future I will always fall back onto the blueprint.
During the last few days of 2009, I made myself think through the events happened in 2009 and how God has been leading me. If you ask me, I would say, I see different sides of the same God in 2009.
I saw Him patiently waiting for me when I said I couldn't. And when I relapsed, I still saw Him patiently waiting for me to surrender myself.
I saw Him making me courageous. He gave me guts to never look back.
He's the most comforting God I've ever experienced. Because admist my struggles, He stood by and listened, and secretly gave me seen and unseen presents through my friends, church, and family. Because of all that He had done and will continue doing, I feel so loved, pursued, important, liberated, and confident now.
Things become so much easier when you just face God in all that you do. In your workplace, at home, when you're out with friends, things become better when you choose to face God only and not man. That's the greatest lesson learnt for me, and I will never want to exchange this with anything in this world.
A quick glimpse of my 2009 prayer topics:
(1) Have faith in God - because faith is believing in something you cannot see
(2) Learn to observe and uncover God's will in every situation
(3) Be joyful not because I try hard to do so, but because nothing is more important than the absolute fact that God is with me all the time and that suffice
(4) Be a source of blessing
I can't say I have achieved 100% of them, but I am thankful that at least I achieved 60% of them :)
So my prayer topics for 2010 are:
(1) Continue to explore what God wants to build in me - because I realize that God is destroying something in me and want to rebuild something new. My character mainly, because I am 23 years old already and somehow, God wants me to grow up and be a real lady.
(2) Be an atypical woman. I used to be a typical woman who only pursues what a normal woman wants or needs. But through some key people in my life, I've been consistently told that that shoe size doesn't fit me.
(3) With whatever conditions in me - to live out God's perfect will
(4) Family gospelization
Do you believe that in every man's life, there's this huge gate. The existence of this huge gate bothers you because it doesn't open no matter what, yet you yearn to crash this gate and open it. This gate is like a nagging problem in your life now. It bothers you much. It could be a relationship problem, financial or family problem. This is something so close to your heart and once triggered, it will affect your thoughts, your mood, and even your way of living.
I once had such a gate too. Truthfully, I am grateful for the existence of this huge gate. I needed the gate then, for I was too proud to surrender. This huge gate gave me a reason to need God. And God used the same problem to teach me lessons about life and loving others. Somehow, I can't remember how and when, I no longer prayed to change the problem. I realized that a problem is no longer a problem when you put it before God and wrestle with Him. I needed that to reformat my life.
One day the gate just opened, just like how the Red Sea separated before the Israelites.
And the darkness was over, because the light is here :)
Next time, when I face another gate, I will use another tactic - that's how the Jericho wall was broken down. :)
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