Tag: encouragement

Christianese 101, prophecy

Christianese 101: Suffering Wars

Adrianna Smith

suffering

I’m kind of more on the sarcastic side of speech every now and again. I will occasionally joke or comment about being tired from school or work, but it’s usually nothing that is that deep for me. I do it just to poke fun at my situation. However, I notice that people get to the point where they get this big chip on their shoulders where they feel like they’ve been through more than another person so they should get more blessings. Or they have been through more than another person so they don’t feel sympathetic to a person’s situation. I see Christians especially falling into that ‘but, I suffered more’ comparison game. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the hunger games of suffering and we’re all having a ‘suffering war’ to see who outshines each other in what they’ve went through. However, God doesn’t play this game though. No, seriously He doesn’t. He actually will bless whomever He wants whether or not they suffered as much as you.

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encouragement

Feeling Defeated

Adrianna Smith

defeated

Crushed. Broken. Ashamed. Grief-stricken. There have been many times that people have faced periods of feeling defeated. Sometimes you wonder why God didn’t answer you in the way He should have. Maybe you’ve been praying for a relative for years and they just seem to be getting worse and worse. Or maybe you were completely out of God’s will and prayed for something and His answer was no. There have been times when I’ve felt like maybe God wasn’t going to come through or perhaps He didn’t come through at that time. In these times you just want to give up on doing what you’ve been doing or call quits on God. However, through the years what I’ve come to understand about feeling like your defeated is that if you are in God’s will you are not defeated at all. One person in the Bible that most would be shocked to discover met what we would call defeat or failure is Jesus.

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encouragement, lessons

Help, God, I settled for a counterfeit!

Adrianna Smith

help

–>Lessons in Contentment<–

So, you prayed and prayed and prayed. Finally, God opened up a door, seemingly miraculously and it seems like He would have you to walk through it. From a distance everything looked great. It seemed to be almost exactly what you needed, however as you started to move closer and closer to it you began to see tons of imperfections that you didn’t notice before. Or worse, you’re like me, and notice every imperfection that could begin to exist in the door before you walk through it and are complaining the whole way and time you walk through it. Thoughts come to your mind that cause you to wonder: ‘Is this really the best that God can do?’ But perhaps you don’t dare utter them out loud, since you know it’s not too good to complain about where God has sent you. As you bite your tongue and decide to settle with the portion God gave you, you still can’t help but think: ‘Lord, I settled with this option.’

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encouragement, lessons

Are We There Yet?

Adrianna Smith

WethereInsta

–>Rushing through your seasons <–

Are we there yet? No, seriously, have we arrived at the destination yet? Not, yet? Really!? Why are we still at this same spot? Round and round again we go. Not knowing when we’ll ever get off of this ride. If I could just get to this place, this spot, with this person, this amount of money, or this position I’d be where I want to be. If I could just jump out of the cold harsh winter I am in and into the fresh sunny Spring I’m craving everything would be settled, right? I just want to get out of here and move forward! There comes a time in everyone’s lives I believe where they are craving and screaming to get out of the current position in life they are in and ready to move onto the next one. You might realize the past position was horrible (read about that HERE), and even if you are moderately ok with the current season, you still find yourself craving a new avenue in your life.

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encouragement, lessons

Respect Your Position

Adrianna Smith

position

You’ve just been moved or have moved on your own. You thought this move was in God’s plans. It seemed like a wise choice. You’ve asked God multiple times about this move and everything seemed to point to this being the right choice. However, as soon as you start to get to this new apartment, job, city, or this new place in your walk with God, you feel uncomfortable. Although it seems this is the position God wants you in, you can’t help wonder if you would’ve been better off staying where you were previously. Even though the place you were at previously had a lot of negative things and would leave you in the same complacent and mundane routine, you find yourself forgetting those things and wondering if the move was worth it. The question you need to ask yourself is: Do you respect your position? Do you respect the position God gave you? The Israelites were a people who had a hard time respecting the detour that God purposely sent them in to be free from slavery Egypt.

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encouragement

You’ve Been Recruited!

Adrianna Smith

Recruited

God wants YOU to follow Him all the days of your life, to give up your life as a living sacrifice, and to honor Him with all you have. The question is will you honor the requirements of being recruited for service or will/have you forgotten about them? Have you forgotten what you first said to Christ when you were first saved? When God recruits us into His kingdom it’s almost the same as when a regular soldier is enlisted.

These soldiers can be called at any time or any day to drafted into service! They cannot afford to be too wrapped up or too attached to what they are currently doing because they never know when it will be their time to be called to serve.

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encouragement

Millionaire Matchmaker

Adrianna Smith

MM

–>Persistent Prayer<–

What if the richest person in the world came up to you and asked you to ask them for anything you wanted, as long as it followed their morals and standards of living? Note that this rich person is very fond of you in a platonic way and wants to help you with anything, especially your needs. Their wealth is infinite, in the sense that no matter what you ask for their wealth will not be depleted much at all. They will match you up with anything or anyone that you need. Not only do they ask you if you want anything, they want you to ask them for the things you need. What’s even more awesome is you don’t even have to pick up a phone to ask them, you just have to start talking and they’ll hear you.

Most people now-a-days would probably be ecstatic at first about being able to do this. They would make sure they followed the rules of making the request. They would probably love asking daily because since they can see that person, they know who that person is, and trust in what others say about that person’s wealth they have full faith that this person could deliver their requests. Why, then, don’t people feel this giddy about God?

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encouragement, lessons

Get Your Own Oil!

Adrianna Smith

GYOO

So, you’ve spent a little time trying to approach God. You feel like you know Him and maybe you do. You feel like He’s telling or leading you to do something in your life: start a business, get a degree, get a job, or whatever it is you feel like He’s leading you to do. You’ve told everyone that God has told you to do this thing. You’ve boasted about how awesome the idea is to as many people as you could.

There’s just one problem: it’s been years since He’s told you to do this thing. What’s worse is you haven’t even started doing anything about this idea, maybe at the most you’ve started a facebook page for it. And to make things even worse you procrastinated so long you no longer have time to do this idea or thought God gave you. So, what do you do? You try to get other people to do it for you–and for free too. If you’re doing something like this you need to ask yourself: Why would God give you something just so you could try to force it on someone else’s shoulders?

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encouragement

What Does the Man in Charge Say?

Adrianna Smith

WDTMICS

I’ve worked for a little while in my life despite my age and dealt with many different supervisors over the years. Sometimes, especially when you really care about doing well on the job and pleasing your boss, we can become obsessed with doing ‘perfect’ work. We can get to the point where we are over analyzing every little detail or thing that we are doing because maybe we really like the place or the people there or the job in general. Sometimes we get so excited about the job we worry too much about how well we are doing and start listening to what others are saying about us. Or worse we nitpick and look down at our own work.

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encouragement

Just Fire Me, God…

Adrianna Smith

 

JfmG
No, seriously God, just do it. Just end this assignment you’ve put me on right now because there is no way I can do this on my own. How do you even expect me to go through this assignment? Am I even qualified? If I am, I guess I just got all kinds of unqualified because this task seems unbearable and impossible! I thought I was prepared, but now I’m not sure. So, what do we do when God sends us on ‘Mission Impossible’? We believe the impossible can be achieved by Him. Let’s turn to Daniel 3.

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