The Meandering Mind of a Christian Woman

            Have you ever felt the need to forgive God? That is a rather audacious thought, forgiving the forgiver?   However, if you have gotten angry with God, you have apparently felt he wronged you in some way, right? When someone does us wrong we must choose to either forgive or carry the grudge. If we get angry with God and stop speaking to him, we are carrying a grudge, we feel wronged.             Put simply, we either believe in God or we don’t. Our relationship with God is a lot like marriage, it’s for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer and any other set of opposites we want to throw in there. Like it or not, if we believe in God, we believe in his perfection too. We live in a sin filled world that can twist our thinking to believe we deserve a stress-free, worry-free, illness-free, whatever-free life. If we are honest with ourselves we know all we really deserve is death. We do serve a loving, living God. He gives us mercy, grace and

            “Guide me oh thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.”   I pray this phrase frequently, especially when I am feeling aimless (which is frequently). Decision making is certainly not a strong suit for me; even supposedly easy decisions like what’s for dinner are challenging. So often I don’t feel God’s leading while I am in the midst of something, it is usually in the retrospective that I become aware that he was indeed leading me.             While going through something I feel as though I am plodding along. I wonder if God feels like I’m plodding too. I had an image in my head this morning of God picking up each of my feet one at a time and moving them one step forward, rather like I would imagine one moving a mannequin. I know how frustrated I become just getting behind a slow person at the grocery store and that is only a few minutes of my life. I wonder how frustrated God must get with me, does he want to shake me and say ‘C’mon, get the lead out, ge

            I have heard people say they don’t know how to pray. Yet, if you are capable of thought, you are capable of prayer. I do not understand why people want to make things more difficult than they need to be. Prayer is a conversation from the heart with God. There are no hard and fast rules to prayer, no set time of day, no specific posture needed, and no particular words that must be said.             I like to think that God is walking beside me all day, every day and simply talk to him as I do any friend. God is so big and so full of love for us he can and does meet us wherever we are. He can meet us in joy, in sorrow, in thankfulness, in complaint, in happiness and yes, even in our anger. He and I have a never-ending running conversation. When I have difficult days, when words won’t come, he helps me through the Holy Spirit, his word says; “ In the same way, his Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercede