Days 184-194 - Taking the Risk of Love

The few pictures shown are results of cameras on loan for testing while repair parts for my camera are supposedly still in transit.

Hemp hearts, though tasty, have ‘cramped’ my eating habits, and light fare has been the result for the past week or so. Friday will attempt a full 3 meals – smoothie breakfast, light lunch with some protein (stomach still cannot handle a salad alone), chicken or fish entrée for dinner. 

Jamaican Beef Patty and watermelon - and - Case-Nifla in Fillo, (Dry cottage cheese, onion, eggs, salt and pepper filling) Green Beans, and Chocolate glazed almond cake and below - Plum Sauce Stir Fry and then Rotisseree Chicken.  Mostly in between was cottage cheese, fruit and hemp hearts and protein shakes.

Back to the PAPA prayer, Crabb discusses the many personalities that resist fully expressing emotions. Perhaps we’ve all been hurt at sometime and it is risky to love completely, accepting the world’s standard to be more social than real?

The premise seems accurate that many who pray also keep emotions on the surface- even when presenting ourselves to God. I’m sure I’m guilty too. Even though we all have this deep longing within that nothing in the world can satisfy, and we would ‘lower ourselves’ to the point of addiction to things, substances or people as we try to fill that longing, we strangely enough hold our inner selves aloof from God – the only one we truly subconsciously know can fill our depths. Perhaps it is because we realize he already knows all that we are and are not and to voice the truth would be to admit that that is who we are.

Another author has captured the basis for this longing within men (respect) and women (love) with a wonderful Bible Study appropriately titled Love and Respect.
The Bible too, shows us the way to attain this balance in marriage – the husband commanded to LOVE his wife as Christ loved the church (willing to die for her) and the wife commanded to show RESPECT to the head of our home, as we show respect to Christ as the head of our hearts and lives.

If I’ve come to the place in life where I’ve found the man I want to live with the rest of my life, and have expressed, at least in marriage vows if not in a more intimate setting, I then found someone I can trust with my risk of loving fully. As wonderful as that is – as wonderful as he is – as wonderful as that love is – how much more amazing is complete and total resting in the arms of my Savior!

Is it a risk to love this completely – to communicate and give love with such real honesty and honor without looking back at how it might affect myself? It seems so, unless I examine the character and kept promises of my affections. Study the names of God found on another tab in this blog. You will surely find what I did. Knowing who it is that loves me, and how it is He loves me, frees my heart to total abandon. To realize that God knows each little quirk I’d love to hide (because I’m either ashamed or even despise some of them), opens the possibility of purpose within His hands, for every nuance He allowed to be created in me – physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, spiritually. Godly purpose releases me from the grip of fear. Crabb concludes “You’ll never find yourself until you find God in your red dot (his description of unsatisfied desire and consuming terror) – or until He finds you in your brokenness.

PAPA Prayer – Day 22