Devotion Nov. 19th

I had to give a devotion at PWOC this week. Just thought some of you might like to read it. :)

This weekend at the PWOC regional conference, there were many speakers that encouraged me and the Lord spoke to me through them about areas of my life that needed work. Since Linda Dillow, author of Intimate Issues was the main speaker for the weekend, we won’t discuss most of what I learned. Let’s just say that my husband is now willing to send me to any PWOC conference, any time.

The 1 activity that really spoke to me, though, was the broken pot activity. We were given a plain ceramic pot in a brown paper bag. We were then told to write down on a scale of 1 to 10 how much we were really willing to be broken by the Lord. After that, we were to smash the pot according to our number and try to put it back together.

I wrote 2 numbers. First, I wrote 10 because that’s where I’d like to say that I’m willing to let the Lord break me. However, my family in recent years has been through some circumstances where we were broken individually and as a family. So I was honest with the 2nd number and put 5.

The circumstance that broke my family was my nephew having Acute Myeloid Leukemia that was so aggressive that after nearly every round of chemo therapy, his cancer cells doubled. He had 2 bone marrow transplants. Nothing really slowed down this cancer. He went from Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis to St. Jude, but he lost his fight the summer of 2006 when he was 8.

My family was broken. We were each personally broken and as a family, we will never be the same. So when I had to write that number, the first thing that popped into my head after I wrote 10, was the Lord saying to me “Will you give me Gabriel if it means walking back into the cancer unit with him?” And I had to admit that until I wrote this devotional at 7 a.m. this morning. Because I fought writing this… my answer was “Lord, I don’t think I can do that. Please don’t do that.”

Proverbs 3:5 says “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” It’s a simple verse to read and put on a note card or bookmark, but one of the hardest to actually follow when it comes down to it. It is the verse that the Lord put in my heart this morning, though.

My answer is now a 10. I will smash that pot all day if the Lord wants me THAT broken. Whether I understand it or not, I will lean on Him.