And then God turns you around.

Oh my goodness. For as much as I have been writing about what I have been learning about God and stuff lately, Di, I have honestly been wrestling so so so so so so hard against needing Him. So so so so so so so so so so hard.

I've been wrestling more against a specific aspect of God: His love. I can't at this point explain to you why I would do such a bizarre thing. I can only tell you that, in the end, God always wins me over.

I've been wrestling against this aspect of God for months and months and months. It is only in the last two or so weeks that I have noticed a definite change/altering in my attitude towards it--and I had noticed a change. Not sure when exactly it happened, but at some point, I figured out I had had enough of theology and doctrine and wanted to get back to the "relationship" part of being a Christian. Interestingly, the Lord immediately started leading me down this path of His love and joy. From every angle I have been confronted with lessons on having joy because God loves me. I saw what God was trying to teach me, but still put up my defenses. Again... I could not at this point explain why.

But anyway. Tonight, everything changed.

Tonight Stephen and I attended our church's very first Sunday night service. I didn't want to go. We had already gone to the morning service and Paul had spoken about the Trinity. I did not want to spend the better pat of an hour trying to understand the Trinity yet again.

But we went. I dragged my feet the whole way...But we went. And Paul talked, not only about the Trinity, but about abiding in the love of God (2 Corinthians 13:14 was the verse for the sermon) and experiencing joy as a result of that.

Then afterward, we had a meal (fried chicken) and some discussion time--both experiments for the night service at this time.

The discussion was really great, and something that came out in it was the Father-child relationship God has with His followers. We were talking about prayer, and how one man found it hard, when he first became a Christian, to approach God for simple, stupid things for himself, like what type of car he should buy after his broke down. Yet God has taught him now that He WANTS us to come to Him. Callan spoke about how a good father, when his daughter comes to him with a splinter in her finger, doesn't say to her, "Oh, just walk it off. It's nothing." No--the father gets out the tweezers and the magnifying glass and takes the time to help the child get it out. Because he WANTS to. He WANTS to love his child, wants to help her, wants to have a relationship with her.

This refresher on how loving parents act and relating it to God our Father stuck very deeply with me, although I didn't say anything in the group about it.

When Stephen and I came home, I asked him to play Carcassonne with me, this really fun tile-placing, map-making game we finally bought. We played one game, and I won--barely--and then I asked him to play one more with me.

Well, in this game, if you haven't played before, you try to build complete cities with the different tiles you draw randomly from the bag. Some of the tiles are end pieces of a city, sometimes they are middle pieces. As you can imagine, sometimes it works out, sometimes not so much.

Well, I had a city that just kept growing, clear to the end of the game. Stephen was quite a ways ahead of me, having completed one huge city of his own and receive a lot of points for it. I knew I wasn't going to finish my city and I was going to lose, and I was very bummed about it, because I had hoped for so many turns that I would get that coveted end piece and complete it and finally get to cash in my points. I had also been quite whiny about it...I'm not always the best sport at games when everything seems to be set against me. :P

There was one tile left in the bag, and it was Stephen's draw. Moping, I wouldn't even look up from my stupid, uncompleted city to see what he got.

All of a sudden a piece plopped down right in the missing spot, completing not only my big massive city, but a tiny two-spot city...Giving me a massive amount of points, enough to go flying ahead of Stephen on the board.

But I didn't move for several minutes. I stared down at the board, at my freshly completed city, not done by my own hand, but by my husband's, in one seemingly insignificant moment of mini self-sacrifice. And in one cataclysmic moment, all my defenses came falling down around me and everything I'd been trying to resist about God came together in one beautiful stained-glass picture. God's grace and God's love stared out at me in unison from a simple playing piece.

"You didn't have to do that," was all I could say out loud. And then I plunged my head into Stephen's arms and cried a little.

Sometimes, just as you think you have mastered the art of not needing God, God grabs you and yanks you right out of it, in exactly the way He created you to need. Nothing else could have spoken so profoundly to me as a simple board game.

God loves me. God knows me. God is my Father. God wants a relationship with me. He is not ashamed of me. He is not embarrassed by me. He is not annoyed by me. He is the God Who Sees Me (Genesis 16:13).

I wish I could write more about all this now...But it's past midnight (and my computer battery is about to die). I hope this has been an encouragement to someone. Thank you for all your prayers. You may not have been praying for this specifically, but just the fact that someone was lifting me up in prayer to God had an impact. So thank you.

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." (2 Cor. 13:14)

-Stephanie

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