Monday, 3 February 2014

Where Jesus leads I'll follow on?

Hello there! Once again welcome to my blog for this week.

So what happened this week? Well other than the usual routine of the week, we have been focusing on a research project we have to do for this year. Without giving too much away, we are focusing our research on the youth around the community of Eston and surrounding areas. The one thing that has struck me whilst doing my research by talking to people or reading case studies is the obvious disadvantage the people who live in the area are in. There are high levels of unemployment, alcoholism and anti-social behaviour. But I believe that these are the type of areas that the Salvation Army should be and are reaching. If you look back at my vlog, I spoke about distribution day and how I felt it was the very reason why the Salvation Army is on this earth in the first place. In Isaiah it says:
                                                   
 Isaiah 61:1 NIV

"The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners..."
                                                       
What a mission. God has sent us, I believe as a Salvation Army to go and do that because what it says in Isaiah is still relevant today, there are still people in poverty who need the good news of the Gospel and there are still people who are suffering in the darkness of their situation. If one thing has really challenged me this year is the vulnerability and the poverty people in this, compared to others, rich country are living in.Seeing people having to choose to go hungry or keep warm, seeing people sleeping on a cold floor because authorities have not taken care to make sure they have a bed to sleep on, walking around estates which look run down but yet people call them home. Is this fair that people live like this? Throughout all of this, my God is Lord of it all. May He give me power, may He give individual corps power, may He give the whole Salvation Army power to make a difference in the world we live and the strength to challenge the injustice we see around us.

Gary preached this Sunday a sermon that got me really thinking. His theme was 'Hitting the wall' and that through our Christian lives we are going to hit a wall of pain and suffering but do we hit the wall and go on and grow from that or do we hit the wall and get stuck and fail tomove on in our spiritual life? This really got me thinking of the walls I hit and almost the ups and downs of my life. But I know that God was with me throughout it all. I suppose that's the thing about following Jesus, being his disciples means following Him no matter where Jesus leads. If you read very carefully in Scripture, the amount of times He led his disciples up the mountainside and then back down again. That's like our lives, following Jesus will take us to the peaks ans the great times, but it will also take us down to the valleys where our faith is tested. But like Gary said in his sermon on Sunday, we can either get stuck in the valley or at the wall or we can use it to grow and have a greater acceptance of the mystery of God because when we are down in the valley, we have to trust God that He'll get us back onto the mountainside through His mysterious and wonder workingGrace.

So I suppose that's my thought for the week. Now it's easy for me to write it in a blog, now I have to go and live it. Trust in God and know that His Grace is sufficient.

God bless.

@peggo36
pegg.j@hotmail.co.uk

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