Intentionality

I wanted to wish each one of you, our followers, a Happy New Year. I have been thinking about how to develop a stronger and more vibrant community this year. I am not necessarily looking for “new friends” just a way to enhance the friendships I already have with a depth of intimacy that includes accountability and mentoring and more. I want to be intentional in my relationships, taking more time to learn about the things that make my friends’ hearts glad and the things that cause them to struggle. I want to have authentic friendships that share joys as well as sorrows; true friends that share one another’s burdens.  Over the years, I have experienced this kind of friendship and I long for it now. I know that my biggest challenge is to have more “margins” in my busy schedule and I am willing to do something to change this. I want to be someone who is available when my friends need a listening ear and a compassionate heart.

I want to be more intentional in my prayer life. When I make a commitment to pray for my family and friends, I want to hear from God to better understand how to pray. This will be a discipline that will benefit me as well as those I am praying for. It will be a blessing to my heart to become the kind of friend that I am seeking-a person of integrity, sincerity, authenticity and committed to pray for each of you this year as God molds and shapes you into the men and women He has called you to be. I will begin by praying that each of you finds peace and calmness in your busy lives so you can “be still and know God” in a more intimate way this year!!! The stillness will open us up to all kinds of possibilities-ability to cope with life stresses and handle unexpected challenges as well as time to join in when surprise celebration opportunities come. As we learn to trust our family and friends to enter into our lives we will be able to share and grow in intimacy, and our burdens will be lighter. We can fill our loneliness and emptiness with true friendship that will help us grow.

Here is one of my favorite quotes so far from a book I am reading called Present over Perfect by Shawna Niequist. The author was talking about the emptiness we often feel when we are stuck in our busy lives without time to “be in God’s presence”

“The only way thru the emptiness is stillness:staring at that deep wound unflinchingly. You can’t outrun anything. All you can do is show up in the stillness…..true silence can’t be avoided if you want to be a truly connected spiritual person. But it’s in the silence that you can finally allow yourself to be seen, and it’s in the being seen that healing and groundedness can begin. When I practice allowing myself to be seen and loved by the God who created me from dust, I start to carry an inner stillness with me back into the noise (of life) like a secret. When you begin to carry God’s love and true peace deep within your actual soul like a treasure chest, you realize that you don’t have to fling yourself around the planet searching for those things outside yourself. You only have to go back in the stillness to locate it. That treasure you’ve been searching for-for so long-was there all the time.”

Here are some of my treasures……Intentionality will bring us closer together in 2017…..

I want this stillness and intimacy for each of us this year so we can discover the treasures we are all searching for.