The Flipside

As I sop up urine from my wood floors for the third time today, I am reminded that there is a flipside to my faith that I would be remiss not to share. Luke 9:23-25 If anyone would come after me he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet lose or forfeit his very self? In my previous post I mentioned being intimidated and scared about heading down this road with Jesus, but i didn't detail my fears, then, so I will be more specific now. Did you notice before that I dropped the ball on God's calling before when I gave birth to my beautiful daughter now age three (potty-training age hence the pee)? When she entered this world, my desire to be an awesome mommy pushed every other priority in my life out the window or, at least, to the edge where I left them teetering unaware of their precarious location until recently when I finally became aware of God's call once again and realized that I had unwittingly gotten off track. As God called me back to faithful service, the fears that had originally pushed him to the side began to desperately fight for my attention, "What if this thing God is asking of me takes more time than I am comfortable giving? I don't want to give up any time with Lili, and what if this changes my carefree, relaxed existance?"Thankfully, the elementary curruculum I have been writing for my church's 3rd-4th graders has kept this verse from Luke 9 in the forefront of my mind, so as i faced these excuses in addition to doubts in my ability in the face of God's call, I was reminded that to truely be a follower of Christ one must be willing to deny her fleshly desires to further God's plan in her life. The first thing I've had to deny in order to move forward with Jesus is my laziness because sleeping in until 10AM doesn't leave enough time to devote to being a mom, housework, and marketing my book. Secondly, the whole Lili thing,not that I'm saying I'm going to push her out of the way now, not ever. I'm going to have to pray about that one because I don't know what it all means. I do know that doing things God's way is the only way to function in this world and still experience peace, joy, and contentment, so God's way it is! Pray for me as I strive daily to deny whatever fleshly desires crop up in an attempt to derail my journey down this new path with Jesus. Oh, yeah, back to the urine...there was a point to that...if I hadn't been blogging, I would have been more on top of my daughter's voiding and not had the messes, so it reminded me that soppping up pee was just my cross to bear for Jesus today;) Not anywhere near as uncomfortable as the one he bore for me and you!