Since I blog, you get the benefit of my learning as well. Fun eh? :)
This first chapter was about setting priorities.
I loved this quote: "The wife of a pastor is the most privileged life you could ever desire. It may not always seem that way, but God cocooned you in a place where you will constantly be exposed to his word. This is a manifestation of his love toward you in Christ. "
I know that God has changed my life so much my having me marry my hubby. Not only because I needed to understand his grace more, but I also needed to understand the depth of his love for me. He shows this to me all the time through my hubby.
So... With that confidence of his never-failing goodness toward you.... Learn to put first things first. It's important to do this you know? If you don't you'll be driven hither and yon and beaten down by the expectations of other people. But the more you understand and are secure in his love for you, the more you can do what you need to do and be okay with it.
To do that you need to look at your life and see where your current priorities lie. " The habitual bent of our souls reveals where we look for satisfaction, security, and significance. Do we look to God for these things, or do we scatter our hopes elsewhere?" Just what is it that I focus on? What is that you are currently focusing on? Does anything need to change in all that?
Search your heart. What do you want out of life? What are the things you feel you need? What makes you despair and panic?
Prioritize your life before you organize it.
Things to help mold your thinking
- Christ... The ultimate example
- A life of prayer - Christ prayed all the time
- Obedience to the father - even when he wanted to be released from his duty, he still did as the Lord God asked.
- Relationships with others - he spent time with people around him, he built himself a community
- Women to follow ie Hannah a woman of prayer, also Proverbs 31 woman
- Women to avoid ie Miriam seeking preeminence for herself Numbers 12:2. She forgot her position was to serve so instead she sought preeminence.
- Mary Love.. Wife to Christopher Love 1639-1651. Wrote a lovely letter to her hubby on the night he was due to be executed. You can read that letter here. Consider this section in Italics that follows, single minded goal of seeing the future for that it holds for us and how nothing else compares.:
- I dare not speak to thee, nor have a thought within my own heart of my own unspeakable loss, but wholly keep my eye fixed upon thy inexpressible and inconceivable gain. Thou leavest but a sinful, mortal wife to be everlastingly married to the Lord of glory. Thou leavest but children, brothers, and sisters to go to the Lord Jesus, thy eldest Brother. Thou leavest friends on earth to go to the enjoyment of saints and angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect in glory. Thou dost but leave earth for heaven and changest a prison for a palace. And if natural affections should begin to arise, I hope that the spirit of grace that is within thee will quell them, knowing that all things here below are but dung and dross in comparison of those things that are above. I know thou keepest thine eye fixed on the hope of glory, which makes thy feet trample on the loss of earth.
- Margaret Baxter... Fellow helper to her pastor hubby.... She learned to be content wherever she was.
Isaiah 26:3-4
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the LORD is an everlasting rock.