God's Training School

It's funny how certain things make you cast your mind back to other things you thought you'd learnt a long time ago. It's taken many months for me to realise, but it has dawned on me again that I'm in the same kind of place that I was in when we were out in Finland. I have so much opportunity to spend time with God, and yet... well, do I? I've just read a post I wrote in July 2006, about God's faithfulness:

When we left to go to Finland last July, I was so tired - I really needed some peace and quiet, some place to reflect and to meditate and to live peacefully for a time. I believe that it's completely in line with God's ways of teaching us and leading us, that for a time we need the incredible atmosphere that I associate with Kings, and to be able to completely let go of ourselves and lose ourselves in worship and adoration of God; but sometimes God knows that we need quietness in our lives, to be able to reflect more and learn on a one-on-one basis of who He is. And I feel extremely priviledged to have been selected for that one-on-one teaching and leading. I feel like I have grown more as a daughter in God this past year than I have any other single year that I can remember. And now I'm here in Manchester, and ready for Year 2 of being in God's Training School!!

It feels strange looking back at that, and wondering what has happened between then and now. I mean, lots of stuff has happened, but it requires so much patience to glimpse the blessings in amongst the fog of memories. And it's not for lack of blessings, it's just that I'm not practised in remembering them.

Anyway this is one of the other old posts I was looking for. I remember this time really well.

On Tuesday I walked home from the shops, looking at the clouds and thinking how cool they looked. As I walked past a bench, God said "sit down with me." So I thought well if it's dry then I will (it had rained earlier). It was dry, and I sat down gratefully because I was really tired, and sat there in a bit of a daze watching the sun and the clouds and the wind on the lake. God said, "just wait..." so I did. And then, it started to hail, really lightly. I put my umbrella up and sat through a light hailstorm, watching the hail bounce on the lake and off my umbrella and generally be really really pretty...

This was one of the high points of my walk with God that summer. Being quiet enough in my spirit to hear His voice, and talking life at a gentle pace in order that when He calls you have time to listen.

I'll tell you what though, the other thing in that particular post I had completely forgotten about. I'm pretty glad I chose to blog a lot that year, there's a lot of thoughts I would otherwise have forgotten! I'm thinking that blogging (for me anyway) is a much more positive way of keeping a diary - only things that you don't mind sharing with the world get written, and if you don't mind sharing them with the world there will (or ought to be) a lot more positivity in them when you come to reading the posts a year or two later, as you search for the nuggets you're sure you wrote.

There. That's far more musings than I was expecting for today. I wonder if I made it through Year Two of the Training School, and if I graduated to Year Three?