I know I mention this a lot, especially on my Twitter but if aspects of faith interest you, take a look at God52. As some will know, I decided to embark on this journey. The whole thing is explained here so have a read and see what you think. As for me, when I saw this I was excited! I knew this was a great opportunity to challenge myself on how strong my faith is and my connection with God really is.
I've tweeted some of my responses to the challenges as have many others on #God52 but after sending in a post and it being used on their site, I thought I'll join the bandwagon and do what others are by documenting all my thoughts on my blog.
So I'll try and get these done every Wednesday after I've had time to reflect on thoughts. If you think what I have to say is interesting, great! If not, fine - each to there own :)
I would just like to add, I will fail and complete some of these challenges, I'm not trying to be arrogant when I talk about doing these things, this is purely to be reflective...
This one is gonna be a bit of a bumper edition! I'll 'backdate' to the very first week.
Week One: It seemed like nice easy one to start with! All about generosity. But there was a very naive part of me, I did the challenge on one occasion, but that was it. It didn't grow into anything else. It was like "right that's done, sorted" and really I missed the underlying point of the whole journey. And besides, all I did was give someone a lift home, nothing spectacularly medal deserving. The whole idea of this is meant to make us look at ourselves and say "Can we change this part of me for the better and to show more of the light of Jesus?" It's not meant to be a checklist kind of exercise. But then hang on, I guess in realising this, it kind of still did its job?... Love how the spirit works!
Week Two: With the previous week's reflections in mind, I was determined to fully commit to this journey. I prayed to say I really am taking this seriously now God, I can imagine he chuckled to himself at that point ;) This challenge then ended up being about prayer! Boom! Now being honest, I really don't pray enough, along with many other things that I should practice far more often, so I took this challenge with some caution on first impression. Did I complete the whole 3 hours devoted time in prayer over a particular thing? Honestly I, perhaps stupidly, didn't time myself, but I probably didn't. However what I noticed was that all of sudden prayer was really on my mind everywhere! It was as if loads of unfolding situations had an arrow pointing to it and saying "you could pray about that." All of a sudden my prayer life had become far more spontaneous, almost with a 'Yeah, lets go with this' approach and I was really enjoying it! Even in some cases I had no idea if they were actually answered. This was a massive change to what I used to think that it really should be only big and/or pressing things that I should pray about.
Week Three: There's a massive catch-22 about this one... the challenge was about humility so publicly writing reflections on this could be seen as defeating the point! But in terms of the actual challenge, logistics got in the way. In the end I resorted to prayer and just left it to God. I was annoyed that what I had planned to do for someone wasn't gonna work out. But that again taught me something! There's just some things I cant control! I know what a statement to make! - Seriously, who do I think I am to try and be in control of everything? That certainly had been in my mindset before my new journey started in September. It made me realise there are just some things I need to offer and commit to God and to trust in that. That has not been an easy thing. I feel I'd got too complacent at where I was in life and didn't look at what God wanted for me anywhere near as much as I should've done. I was probably very guilty of letting culture influence my actions which isn't the way if you're looking to be a disciple.
Week Four: My thoughts are on the guest blog here.
So there you are! Check out Week Five. This one could be a lot harder than what I first thought, but I'll let you know next week!
Love.
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