Those who know me, know that I love baking.
Recently I tried a new recipe and it flopped, literally. As I’m reaching out in new faith, for this next season in life, I find my faith a little shaky. Kind of like the three layer cake I made that started sliding off it’s foundation. There is nothing you can do, but push it back together. When that didn’t quite work, I scooped it up in pieces and put it in a casserole dish. Whatever it takes right? My faith might be a mess, but I won’t let my mess, stop my faith!
[Tweet “My faith might be a mess, but I won’t let my mess stop my faith!”]
Messy or not it’s my faith and I’m determined to feed my faith, not my fear. So I’ve been talking about the miracles that I have seen God do and letting them resonate in my heart. We all need jolts of caffeine to spur our messy faith onward. Join me for a cup of light roast coffee and let’s chat about what God can do.
I’ve drank enough cups of coffee to know, that I’m no longer friends with dark roast coffee. A while back we were given a case of dark roast coffee beans. We drank it away, gave it away, carried it away (when we moved out of state), and eventually threw it away. I had the best cup of coffee ever, the morning after the last bag of dark roast coffee was tossed out. No. More. Dark. Roast. For. Me.
Recently I tried a medium/dark roast coffee thinking the medium roast may even out or lighten the bitter taste of the dark. More cream and sugar filled my cup than coffee, yet the bitter flavor pushed through. If faith was like coffee, I would chose the light roast every time.
Nothing builds our faith like seeing God act, doing only what he can do, where it looks like all hope is lost. Before the supernatural there is a “roasting” process where our faith grows. Fresh coffee beans expand, darken and crack if they are left long enough in the roasting process. A light roast ends just before the first crack, the coffee beans remain dry, and they have the highest content of caffeine in this state. Yep, give me the light roast cup of coffee please.
Laying in the basement of our friends home I began praying for a miracle. I had witnessed the “dark roasting” process of “hard faith” and seen God take what earth voiced would not live, and give it life again.
A Pastor and close friend, was involved in a car accident, that left him for dead, as he lay on the ground, thrown from his truck. His wife would later write, “The extent of his injuries led physicians to believe that he would have permanent brain damage, paralysis, and the loss of limbs. God healed his body leaving his physicians amazed.”
If God could do that, God could heal the leak in our basement right? . . . and those are the thoughts running through my mind that fused the prayers I began to pray late in the night.
It had rained all day. The moving trucks were packed full of all of our belongings. The next morning was the final buyer walk through at seven, and then we would close on the sell of our home and move across state. That night my husband located water coming into our basement, for the first time, and my heart sunk.
News like this could stop the sell of our home or cost us a lot of money that we did not have. Laying on a blow up bed in our friends basement, late in the night, I began to pray. I prayed the kind of prayer that gets ones faith ignited.
As I recalled what I had SEEN God do, those “God did” moments in our life and in the lives of those close to us, my faith jolted forward believing that he could and would heal this leaky basement.
It rained hard all night long. The next morning my husband met the buyers at the house. They made their way through the house and on into the basement. They found no water, no cracks, and furthermore, no evidence that water had ever seeped in. The rain may pour, but the rain cannot stop our God! The rain only highlights the impossible, that God alone does.
So I step forward again, picking up my messy faith and fueling it with all of the “GOD DID” caffeine experiences that I have seen before my very eyes. I invite you to give your faith a jolt of caffeine too.
Repeat the miraculous to fuel our faith,
Pray believing in faith,
Wait and trust and keep trusting, and . . .
Repeat!
What you have seen before your very eyes, you KNOW, that you know, that you know!
On the journey to more,
Joelle
[Tweet “But watch out! Be very careful never to forget what you have seen the Lord do for you. Deut. 4:9”] Do not let these things escape from your mind as long as you live! And be sure to pass them on to your children and grandchildren.
Has any nation ever heard the voice of God speaking from fire – as you did – and survived? Has any other god taken one nation for himself by rescuing it from another by means of trials, miraculous signs, wonders, war, awesome power, and terrifying acts? Yet that is what the Lord your God did for you in Egypt, right before your very eyes. [Deuteronomy 4:33-34]
