Advice to My Eighteen-Year-Old Self (Part One)

 This weekend was a major milestone in my life. My youngest child turned eighteen this weekend. At least legally, all of my children are adults. This is the point where I insert crying and weepy faces. I remember the time when all of my children were little. I had three in diapers for a span of 5 or six years. As I changed unending diapers, cleaned endless messes, and battled temper tantrums, nightmares, and boo boos, I felt like independence would never come. Now, as we celebrated all my babies growing up, I realized that in a blink, they're grown up. For my son's birthday, my oldest son wrote him a seven page letter giving him advice from his experiences over his young adulthood. This had me thinking what my current self would tell my eighteen-year-old self. Over the next couple of week's I want to share what I would tell my younger self.  1) Things don't have to be perfect to be from God. When I was younger, I had this rose-colored glasses look at the will of God. I had thought that if it's God's will, everything would go smoothly. Part of this was due to a lot of prosperity teachings of the time. They had this idea that if you're in the will of God, you would have money rolling in, be favored everywhere you went, and the air you breathed would be scented like cotton candy. Ok, maybe not quite that bad, but close. This view-point was dangerous because we live in a fallen world where we have an adversary seeking to destroy our faith in God. He won't allow everything to be easy when we are obeying God. So when I erroneously believe that following God's will is easy, then when hardships come, I either abandon following God or blame God for allowing bad things to happen. What I've learned over the years is that being in God's will is hard. It costs a lot to give up my personal choices to follow what God knows is best for me. Following God is uncomfortable at times. He asks me to stretch my boundaries to let people in my life. He asks me to forgive people who've hurt me because He loves them as much as me and knows the damage holding in unforgiveness can do to a person's soul. He asks me to be kind to people others look down upon and to give as though what I own was never mine in the first place. None of these things look perfect or make sense to the world. Ultimately, He tells me that His will is letting Him be front and center in my life.  So as I look back, I'm glad I've followed God. Through hard times of forgiving when I didn't want to, I've been given real peace that is much better than perfect.

Have a great week high-heeled warriors!


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