Hope Adventure.

I am being unconventional in my resolutions this year, by not making a ginormous list of things I want to accomplish like I usually do. Usually the list has a number of character things, practical things and some way-out idealistic things.
I'm trying something new.
I have chosen to focus on Spiritual Discipline as I was starting to do toward the end of last year.
Calhoun's Spiritual Discipline Handbook has been great, as well as a class I took in Spirituality for Global Ministry, last year.
I have sensed a push from the Holy Spirit to try some of these things. My first step was making room. Since 2009, the message I was getting from the Lord was "make room", so I am in a place now where a lot of external things have shifted in such a way that I am making a bit more room.

I come across some helpful ways that I really feel God has dropped into my life, through others.
Ann Voskamp's blog contains some awesome tips and encouragement for incorporating Spiritual Discipline into everyday life.
I particularly liked her "100 days" Calendar. You pick 3 things each day for 100 days in order to help build habits. It is realistic. Plus I get to check little boxes if I do it! I love checking boxes.
So far it's been going really great. One of these things is to memorize Philippians, 2 verses a week.
Her blog has also encouraged me to make the gratitude list I've been keeping.

By God's Grace, I am learning the difference between cooperating with the Holy Spirit for transformation as opposed to feeling the weight of duty or obligation, striving in my own strength to accomplish what I think God wants me to accomplish.
I am learning about His love, his UNFAILING love, his UNCONDITIONAL love, his FREEING love.
"The Unfettered Rhythms of His Grace..." (I forgot where I first heard this phrase)



So yesterday I found another great way of making resolutions, without really making resolutions.
On Faith Barista, I was invited to find one word that would shape the year.


God Words that have recently been shaping me:
"His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse,
nor his delight in the legs of the warrior;
the LORD delights in those who fear him,
who put their hope in his unfailing love"- Psalm 147:10-11.

The one word that nipped me in the nose...
HOPE.
Hoping....
in his unfailing love.

Hoping in His unfailing love.
His UNFAILING love.
His LOVE.

And so the journey continues...the journey to know this hope, to know the Love in which I hope.
praying in this hope....for this hope...
Waiting...
Leaning into...
with Baited breath...
...
Already it has been a butterfly in the stomach, jumping-out-of-my-skin experimental leap....
but when I open His Word, it is a prevailing, a rooting, a settling, a resting... a healing.

Boldly, we can embark on a Hope Adventure with our Love.

" For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 3:14-21