Lara Love's Blog, page 408

DAILY INSPIRATION 12/13: Thinking About Forgiving

"I'm thinking about it," the woman told me. She was thinking about forgiving someone whose actions devastated her life and changed it forever. "That's all I can do right now."

This was progress. Ten minutes earlier, she almost exploded at the mere suggestion of forgiving the person. But still, she had not made a decision. She seemed to see this as a choice. A possibility. A maybe.

"You don't realize what this person did to my life," she told me. "You wouldn't forgive this person," she added.

"Ye...

DAILY INSPIRATION 12/11 - The Life I Didn't Want

I didn't want my life. I wanted nothing to do with it. It was worthless, as far as I was concerned. Purposeless. Its only value, as far as I could see, was in ending it. Finishing it all off. Instead of wasting space. Unwanted space, mind you. So I spent years doing everything I could to end the pain, escape the pain, get rid of the pain, take the edge off the pain, avoid the pain, fix the pain, heal the pain, pain, pain, and more pain. Broken down. Broken. Down. Always down. The ups were few...

DAILY INSPIRATION 12/10 - A Whole Bunch of Humble Me's

So I asked God the other day if it would be okay to just be me. My silly, goofy, off-the-beaten-track, march-to-a-different-drummer, shabby chick Christian, jeans-and-thrift-shop-and-hand-me-downs wearing, simple life, passionately, head-over-heels-in-love-with-the-Lord, preaching, writing, oftentimes dirty-from-all-the-dogs, stepping-on-poop-way-too-often, me. And in a season of pleading with Him to help me to walk free from the pride He has shown me has run so rampant in my life, He sort of...

DAILY INSPIRATION: Right Action, Wrong Heart

I will never forget the day I boastfully, pridefully, and arrogantly patted myself on the back for cooking dinner for someone who was mistreating me on a regular basis. I wish I could say I only gloated. I did not. Pride has a way of building itself up pridefully. Pride breeds more pride, doesn't it, unless it gets stopped in its tracks. Needless to say, gloating was insufficient back in those days. I got on my big-mouth PA system and told my friends what a good loving woman I was to fix dinn...

DAILY INSPIRATION - My Life-Changing WHAT IF

What if behind every mean, nasty, rude, selfish, violent, abusive, hurtful, hateful, ugly, miserable, smelly, disgusting, or anything in the category of YUCK person who got in your way, hurt you somehow, made your life harder, violated you, betrayed you, etc. was a broken heart in dire need of fixing?

And what if the real reason you crossed paths with that person whether for a moment, an hour, a day, a week, a year, or a lifetime wasn't an accident, a mistake, or for the purpose of you getting...

DAILY INSPIRATION 12/9 - The Little Old Lady's Good Ear

She is a little old lady, but you would hardly know it. Her light shines bright; she is a child of light. She keeps her Bible close at hand. She memorizes scriptures to keep safely tucked inside her heart. She may get around these days only with the help of a walker, but her faith walk is strong and her heart seems to sing. She forgot her Bible when I preached at her assisted living facility recently, so she sent me to her room to fetch it. She told me to go into the little pocket of her recl...

DAILY INSPIRATION 12/6 - The Man Under My Mistletoe

"Here, this is for you," the man told me as he stretched out his hand to me.

I looked a little warily at the sprig of who knows what. I simply didn't know what it was. But the man insisted, so I took it from him.

"It's mistletoe," he told me.

Whoever would have guessed? The man, supervisor to a crew of tree cutters who had just lopped off way more branches than I would have preferred from the trees on my property to make way for the new power lines, had just handed me a sprig of mistletoe. I can...

DAILY INSPIRATION: Tree Cutters, Pruning, and Power

If you've ever taken your pruning shears to your bushes, your trees, your anything at all in your yard, you've more than likely felt a sense of relief as you lopped off the excess, the unnecessary, the in-the-way, the whatever stood in the way of a much prettier yard. So you sweated. So you labored. So you might have had better things to do. So you might have wished your kids would have offered to help, or that you could have afforded to pay someone. Or maybe you enjoyed every single minute o...

DAILY INSPIRATION 12/4 - Drunk, Down, Upward

I could have cried. But instead I sat on the wooden pew humbled beyond measure as I watched the man weeping. Drunk. Down. Upward. Less than 20 minutes earlier, he had walked into the church along with the usual weekly assortment of homeless, low-income, struggling, hurting, broken, you name it, crowd of people hungry for a good hot meal, some fellowship, and a short program at the church's soup kitchen. But the man I watched weeping on his face on the floor so near where I sat hadn't gone int...

DAILY INSPIRATION 12/3 - Tears of Mercy

Have you ever cried mercy tears? I have found myself crying lately tears of mercy, the most unselfish tears I have ever cried. Tears I have cried in prayer, in intercession, with compassion, with desperation, with a genuine, pure, sweet, love that could only come from one source alone. From the Lord most high. For I have cried these tears with a yearning beyond measure for the Lord to save and heal, to deliver and set free, to touch and transform, to move in the hearts and the lives of people...