Simply Listening

I was laying in my bed two nights ago and I thought to myself, "I haven't been praying daily" So, trying to pray I shortly found my brain being all jumbled together and I couldn't think a clear thought to save my life, and so I was wondering how or what I should pray to just explain everything I was feeling to God and while in the middle of trying to do this I was listening to a cd and it was on shuffle, so this song came on, and every word in that song said exactly how I was feeling! It was just an "ah ha" moment, kinda like the light bulb just turned on. So, the song passed and I meant to blog yesterday about the whole thing but I never got the chance to do it, so I just dropped it and didn't really worry about writing anything about it... and then I turned that same cd on last night still on shuffle and the song I heard the night before was the first song that played and those words were still the words on my heart... I think when God puts something on our heart we need to say it and if we shy away he just gives us another opportunity to share what we're feeling. "If you listen you will hear, if you plug your ears and go, "lalalalalala" you're never going to hear anything!!!"

Eggs for Easter

Ok, I've been thinking and people are a lot like eggs. If you take an egg from its mother hen and put it in a cold dark place the egg dies, it gives up any life it ever had. Now if you were to hard boil an egg taken from the hen to paint it and to decorate it... you're really only painting the shell, not the egg itself. So, get this straight, have you ever decorated an egg for Easter? If so you'll know that you can't leave the egg out of the fridge after you paint it, right? If you leave the egg out it will be ruined, it will go bad and spoil, but go back to the painted idea. After you're all done painting your egg, if you take an egg out of the fridge that you haven't painted and put it next to the one you did paint and you were asked the question, "Which egg is prettier?" Which egg are you going to choose? We all know you're going to choose the painted one, no doubt! But... if you peel the shells off of each egg they're really not that much different on the inside. You might have a little different coloration in the yoke but that's not 'cause the paint on the one egg. "Difference isn't a bad thing as long as you keep the right perspective." Alright so, it's just the outer layer of the egg that's beautiful... the inside is ugly and plain. So, we've looked at the dead egg, the one that has been ripped away from its mother, the mother who's there to protect the egg and care for it. Now, let's talk about the egg left under a broody hen. Alright, so if you have a faithful hen, the hen will do anything to help that little egg mature, right? So if you watch and study the changes of the egg through the weeks of maturing, it starts as an ugly, ugly yoke inside of this ugly shell! But if you give the egg time and if the hen helps it along, gives it warmth, and the space it needs to grow, you're going to turn out with a really cute chick. Now, we need to go back to the egg, I'm not done with that yet! When the egg's done maturing it slowly but surely breaks through the outer shell. (We've hatched chicks before and it was the first time we'd ever done it and we watched and watched and watched it slowly hatch, let me just tell you this... it takes a long time for a chick to hatch out of its shell.) But... if you give it time to come out of its shell to break free from its little "so called prison" and it hatches completely, sometimes part of the egg will be stuck to the chick at first but if you watch... either it will fall off or the mama hen will peck it off and then she tucks the chick under her wing to give it warmth. Now, please don't take this story just for the sake of hearing about eggs, but apply the eggs to your life, "Some people are just hard boiled and they're dead inside but decorated on the outside, they look pretty to the rest of the world but if you peel the shell back they're empty, ugly, and dead." Now... take the egg that had time to grow and a mother hen to look after it... "If you give people time to grow and if you help them along, encourage them, give them warmth when needed, and sometimes give the person enough space to breath and to figure out what they must do next to break out of there 'shell' figuratively speaking." So... take this story in the way it's meant to be told. Please, understand sometimes you need to be the little egg trying to do everything in its power to break free from its shell and sometimes you need to be the mama hen helping someone along with all they're going through. Please, oh please don't be one of the hard boiled people!!! The hard boiled people either get thrown out because they've gone bad or they get eaten up by the world and all the sin surrounding the world. When you're the little egg you have someone watching over you to help you mature into what you need to become, most of the time this someone is God, the one who created you in the first place, the one who gave you life and a hope!!!