But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.  These words have taken me out of the dark and have brought out the light.  These words have been running through my head like a mantra since I heard them in church yesterday.  These words have been a salve to my heart that has been hurting so badly.  Lately things have been so hard.  I have felt life my life was drowning me.  Between work and home and my girls things have just been so hard.  Honestly I have felt broken and I have not know what to do about it.  I mean what do you do when you feel like your life is sucking everything out of you and there is nothing left for yourself?  I honestly don't know what happened.  I do know that since yesterday I have been thinking of the end of Joshua 24;15 almost constantly in my head.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.  This section of Joshua talks about serving God sincerely and turning away from idols to serve God fully.  Joshua 24:23 “Now then,” said Joshua, “throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.”  What I realized in that moment is that I may not worship the "gods" that this chapter is referring to, but I am putting other things in my life before God and that might as well be the same thing.  My life has not changed drastically since yesterday, but its all about perspective.  All of the same things are still going on in my life, but when I think but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.  The one and only thing that I should be worried about is serving the Lord and the rest of it will fall into place. I heard a song on the way home from school today that talked about how God sees all the suffering that you go through and sometimes He puts you through that to come out stronger on the other side.  When you are in the middle of these tough times it is hard to see the purpose and honestly it is hard to feel like God is with you.  Its hard to even feel like He cares about you sometimes.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.  Who knows what the days to come will bring and how I will respond to those things that are coming my way?  All I know is that right now I don't feel like I am drowning today and this mantra is still running through my head.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Steal My Joy

Do you know the song Old Church Choir by Zach Williams?  I hear this song all the time and I love it.  For about two days now there is one line from that song that has been stuck in my head: There ain't nothing gonna steal my joy.  No there ain't nothing gonna steal my joy.  I have realized that God is trying to tell me something.  God is trying to show me how often and how many different people I let steal my joy all the time.  The wonderful joy that I feel when singing about Him alone in my car.  The joy that I feel because of the wonderful children He blessed me with.  So many times a day I let people steal my joy.  Between some of life circumstances that come up and some of the students that I teach I let them steal the joy from my heart.  I let this profession, where I go in all day just trying to do what I can to put a band aid on a system that is broken, beat me down.  I let these students taking out their other issues on me take away pieces of me.  Sometimes I let all the burdens that come with having two little ones, working full time, and being married to a football coach steal away little pieces of my joy.  Sometimes my heart feels so heavy because I have given up so many pieces that I don't have any left.  I know that the big answer to this is that I just have to rely on God and He will project the joy in my life and exude it out of my heart.  I know that I need to trust and rely.  That always seems to be the big answer.  The problem with that is that I don't know that next right step to take.  I don't know what it is that I need to be doing in order to be able to truly trust and let go. 
I have gone my whole life thinking that I needed to be self sufficient and that they only person I could truly rely on was myself.  Now I am slowly learning that I cannot rely on me.  That I can't do it.  God always wanted me to know that I can't do it.  How do I overcome years of conditioning telling me that I'm the only one?  What is the one next step?  I know what the problem is, but where do I go from here and how do I start to fix it?  Maybe one day I will figure it out.