seven circles with life experience

• Life experience always gives the best indication if what one preaches they are also willing to live.
• It's easy to pass judgment on another's situation, especially when you have not traveled that road yourself.  It seems the softer the response, the more life the one speaking has experienced.
• Life experience is teaching me that it is inevitable to not cross the path of one who is suffering. It's easier to walk away....but then what would that show of Jesus- maybe this one goes back to the top of this list....Life experience always gives the best indication if what one preaches they are also willing to live
• It has been shown to me that those who stuck by the one suffering- who weathered the storm with that vulnerable precious soul, who showered the one hurting with compassion and kindness, is the type of person I long to be.  Standing by the one suffering can be depressing, it can be draining, it requires patience and all those things that our flesh wants to run from.  But it also produces Christ like qualities that our world longs to see- people are starving to see Jesus in us.  Not surface 'talk the talk' Jesus but when the rubber meets the road and the only explanation can be 'Jesus in you' type of Jesus.
• Life experience has also taught me that not all who begin your journey, will finish it with you- and that's ok.  It used to be a devastatingly grievous thing, letting go.  But I'm slowly coming to realize that, if your having to chase and then grab for, your too busy trying to force what isn't yours and missing what God's putting right in front of you.  It's still hard though, the letting go, and I don't like it at all.
• But on the letting go note, sometimes, when we are all done with our tactics and holding on, it gives God room to work.  In those times, what He does, never ceases to amaze me.  
• Lastly, the most valuable life experience lesson I have learned to date is this.... I need Jesus, at all times and in all things.....life's a broken mess without Him.  Oh, don't get me wrong, Life's still hard, even with Him- It's still messy- but it isn't broken.  Because, with Him, even the messiest situations still have His promise.  The promise that He is working all things out for His Glory and our good and the promise of Heaven- the here is just fleeting and the there of Heaven, all of it's perfection and Glory, is forever.

Happy Saturday to you!!