God is for you. God is with you.
God loves you beyond all you can imagine.
Right here. Right now. As you are.
I reach for a blank notecard from the stack by my bed in the early morning light. I scrawl “Strength” across the middle and write below it these words, “God is the strength of my heart” (Psalm 73:26). I think of the busy day ahead and silently pray, “Yes, God, please be my strength today.”
I’ve begun collecting names of God—Strength, Friend, Refuge, Savior, Comforter. I first started this in a document on my laptop but it has now spilled onto these notecards too. I’m a woman obsessed.
And I need to be because this is not what comes naturally to me. I am a striver, not a lover, by nature. I spent years stressing out for God, trying to prove my worth and earn His love. But I have come to understand there is a deeper, better way.
The other morning I could feel my heart racing and my to-do list growing before my feet ever even hit the floor. I paused and prayed, “God, I don’t want to be Your employee. I want to be in love with You.”
I imagine many of you would say the same. And perhaps, like me, it can be a struggle to know what loving God means in the ordinary day-to-day. Deuteronomy 4:5 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
And here’s the secret I’m slowly discovering: We can serve a stranger but we can only deeply love someone we intimately know.
For me that means the notecards by the bed, one name written down each morning. For you it might be walks outside looking at the creations of the Maker who made you. It might mean finding more of God in front of the stove or on a platform at the front of a stadium. We can know Him anywhere and everywhere.
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