After a few months break I am once more back "Living in the Shadow of Victory" and will hopefully keep blogging. If you are still planning on reading the blog then let me know and keep in touch. I am aiming to make this more interactive so feel free to leave comments or suggestions and if any of you want to meet up for coffee then yippeeeeee. One of the best things about blogs and Facebook is keeping in touch...but also the other great thing is renewing friendships and meeting folk for coffee ....so give me a call/email me and would love to meet up ....
I have had a very difficult few months and at times I thought I wasn't even living in the "the shadow" but had lost my way completely !....I took a couple of months out from writing this blog to work through the 60/60 experiment and that was very timely and has helped me enormously to find the "rock " again and to get back on my feet spiritually.
It will take a few entries to get clear in my mind what has been happening but it has been a kind of "shaking " time..I have felt at times that everything I thought about myself was being shaken and I have not liked this at all. As I have worked my way through all the misunderstandings and miscommunication and mistakes I realised that somehow or other I had lost confidence in myself ...in me...in the way I was as a person..in how I handled things...in how I was gifted....I seemed to have no hold on who I was or how I fitted into things any more. The two main areas of my life which have been fairly constant have been my ability to "communicate"....and to "encourage" and it seemed as if I had lost these gifts and certainly I lost the self confidence that was required to actually exercise these gifts. For a time I was floundering in a sea of confusion and believe me this is not a good place to be.....and it is only through making some hard decisions that I can begin to move on.
To enable me to gather myself back into some semblance of healing and wholeness I have taken the somewhat radical decision to lay down all that I am involved in with church. This is a strange place for me to be in....having been fully involved for decades in so much I now find myself with so much time ...physical ..spiritual and mind space...For years my body ...mind and spirit has been occupied with "church stuff"...meetings...arrangments...organising...serving...leading...praying....etc and now I have this empty space in these areas which I have found hard to cope with and yet know this is where God wants me to be right now. During the 60/60 experiment I was amazed at how much I needed to connect with God and how hard it was sometimes to keep the connection going so I know that for this next season of my journey I will be looking to God to fill up all the empty bits.
My ongoing scripture and prayer for myself at the moment is from
Philippians ch 1 verse 6 ...being confident in this...that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
I know that perhaps my self confidence maybe in tatters but the truth of this verse re-assures me that God has confidence that He will complete the work in me...
