There’s a verse in The Message translation of the Bible that pushes all of my buttons. The Apostle Paul is speaking to the people of the Early Church. Here’s how it reads in The Message:
Dear, dear Corinthians [don’t you just feel the love?] I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!” (2 Corinthians 6:11-13, emphasis added by me)
Paul, as a messenger of God, was urging people to be wide open to hearing and responding to God’s ways. Here is how I want to live more this way this next year:
- Take time to consider scripture and listen to God
- Write down in my journal what I sense God speaking
- Be willing to act on what I sense God is saying and doing
- Continue to invite God to work in my life, to show me how to live, how to think, how to break out of my own self-imposed limitations. I know that without God’s work in my life, I am constrained by my limiting thoughts and mindsets.