Hello lovelies! Happy New month once again. Hope it's going great so far.
Now that I'm in uni, I find that I generally have much more alone time than when I'm back home in Glasgow. And I've come to realise that, although there's a lot of alone time, I don't have many quiet times.
By Quiet times, I mean periods where there's just silence. No distractions, no noises, not even any music; just you and your thoughts. It's in these quiet times that I actually have the time to just sit down and reflect on everything that's going on in my life.
But for some reason, I've often tried to avoid these quiet times. I have to have music playing, I need to be watching something, I need to be talking to someone. Anything to prevent me from having to sit down with just the silence.
Why?
Because I know that when I actually take time to reflect on my life and the things that are going on, I'll have to actually admit that I'm not on the path that I first started off on.
I attended a one week youth conference in July, which impacted me so much. I love going to church camps/conferences because it's a period of time that actually kind of urges you to put everything else aside for a few days and reevaluate your relationship with God and your spiritual life. And I know many of us need that kind of atmosphere and that push from time to time, to allow us to turn back to God and fall back into the right path.
And that's exactly what the conference did. It helped me reexamine my lifestyle and pushed me to make things right; to start living in the way that God expects of me.
So I started to change things, and I started to set goals. But as is probably the case for many of us, you can guess what happened as time went on. I began to slack off. Addictions I vowed to finally stop slowly crept back up on me. My zeal for improving my relationship with God got buried under the stress that school was piling up on me. I fell back into lackadaisical states where I couldn't be bothered to do anything productive or even text friends.
And I knew that I was off track. But I just couldn't admit that I needed to pause and go back. I didn't feel like it; I didn't want to. And that's why I never wanted to be surrounded by silence. Because I knew that it was in that quietness, that God would speak to my heart and remind me that I had gone the wrong way.
Despite my unwillingness to get myself back on track, God still found ways and means to get me to hear His voice. He tends to do that. Finding the little possible ways for His message to get to you, whether it's through an Instagram post, a friend's words or through a situation that you're encountering. And that's what He did with me.
It took a while but just a few days ago, when things had died down, I suddenly felt the urge to just be quiet and actually embrace the silence. And in this silence, I was able to really reflect on the past few weeks; where I went wrong and what I had to do to make things right again.
And I thank God for not giving up on me, even when I felt that He should or when I felt totally unworthy and beyond grace. We need to remember that His grace is always sufficient for us, (2 Corinthians 12:9), whether we deserve it or not.
I'm sure most of us feel that way. We're unwilling to stay in the silence or embrace the quietness because we fear what realisations may come to us.
However, it's in this quietness that God finds a way to talk to us; revealing so many things that we would never imagine. He's there in the stillness of it all, pulling at our heartstrings.
The question is, are you willing to let Him speak?
Comment your thoughts on this or email them to me. Love you guys!
Stay blessed and stay a blessing.
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