So, God gave each of us here on earth other Christian brothers and sisters who help *gracefully* direct each other into a better place with our Spirit. For me, without her even knowing it, mine is my dear friend, Anna Bargeron. Anna is my hiking friend, mom friend, and my family photographer for life. But she is also the brightest example of Jesus I have encountered in a long time and she is refreshing to be around. I recently heard a tale from other hiking mom friends of a hike in which Anna and her two beautiful babies and her very nice camera (remember, she is my professional family photographer) partook in to a beautiful waterfall. I believe the story details were a mush of this: Mama Anna wanted a photo with her babies. Babies had already been struggling that day as all the babies in the crew do every so often....and Anna takes a slip or perhaps back up too far into a large rock or boulder....regardless of the finessing of the details, a stressed mama's camera lens was lodged between her thigh and boulder, dislodged, and went for a daredevil dive over the waterfall.
She had had a day y'all and this was the cherry atop the whipped cream on the ice cream sundae. Yet, my soul mentor portrayed a beautiful example to all of our friends and the children present of a graceful nature and heart. Y'all know home girl had to be dying, screaming, and breaking down inside. But, she merely made a face of anguish and only repeated how everything was fine. I was not on this hike with her I will remind you so it is evident how beautiful her grace is that it traveled back to me.
It was a tale of tales in our hiking group. A tale I took home with me and that really grew my Spirit that day. Often I reflect on that story now and her nature and response and her grace with everything that was that day. I had a conversation with God in the shower as I thought about it and I asked God to help my Spirit to pause, reflect, think, and have grace before I responded to people. I have such an unforgiving and unkind fuse with those that I find incompetent, lazy, rude, or careless. I still do not have a lot of tolerance for such characteristics in behavior yet, I feel that the Holy Spirit is working on my soul and my Spiritual heart and eye sight to remind me to first breathe, smile, and watch my voice and tone. It is the most complicated thing for me. I am truly flawed at offering grace like God.
Why is it important? Well, folks, I'll tell ya. First of all God could have chosen not to have grace on all of mankind and our sinful natures. He could have easily chosen as the King of all creation to condemn us to Hell without a chance at eternal life with Him. And the reason we have a choice to love God and live eternally with Him is because of His grace to forgive us of all of our wrong doings and sinful attitudes, mindsets, and behaviors. We have wronged God over and over and over every single day. We have cursed Him, lied to Him, disobeyed Him, ran from Him, turned Him down, ridiculed Him, spat on His great name. And every time we do this, we forget how God deeply loves us so much that He sacrificed His own son to bear our sins so that we may be considered clean and washed white that we may enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Holy Spirit must fill our hearts. It is not enough to simply believe. Satan believes God is really after all. We must ask for our souls to be filled with the Holy Spirit and thus our actions will look much more like that of God. The fruits of the Spirit after all are Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self control. All of these work together and daily I know I need to tune myself to the heart of the Holy Spirit.
Just wanted to share how God decided to grow my Spirit, which I hope is a continuous growth all of my earthly life. Thankful for hiking trails with mamas who love Jesus and friends who love each other well!
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