Opportunities and distractions

If you’ve been a fan of reVision Women’s Ministry or have been following my blog and my story, you know that it has been blog silent for the past month or so. If you were wondering what happened…let me catch you up.

In April God blessed me with the job of my dreams…as a staff writer for my county’s newspaper.

In January I officially launched reVision and as much as I would have loved sitting back and just running the ministry full time, this job opportunity was clearly God’s gift. When I look at all the reasons I should NOT be working at the paper, I see God’s hand orchestrating it all in to being.

But at the end of October, I was given a promotion to take the position of Co-Editor. It was an opportunity of a lifetime and I jumped at the chance.

My job is a blessing in so many ways. Financially, it is nice to have the extra money. But the rewards that keep me coming back are not measured in dollars…. I have had the opportunity to do things that I would never have had the chance just sitting at home trying to promote reVision out of my home office.

On a daily basis, I am in communication with every kind of community leader and government representative. I have the chance to tell people’s story…those stories that would otherwise be unknown. I can take a paper that on one page tells stories of death, destruction and demise and on the other page, I can share a missionaries story of saving teenagers from being exploited…I get to help churches promote outreach events…I can interview nonprofit groups that have a heart to see people have better lives. This is a job, but it is a job of service.

And….it is a job of long, long, long hours. Over the past month, our newsroom has operated rather short staffed. That has made the work load heavy. As the days ticked by, I saw the dust starting to collect on my laptop and on my journal. Today, I started to head out to church and I couldn’t even locate my Bible…a testimony to the small amount of time I have spent in it over the past weeks.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have taken an account of the amount of work versus the other things in life I want to make time for…..friends, family, church, reVision, studying the Bible and reading books that develop me personally.

Noticing how out of balance my life seems to be, I started to get frustrated and I started to feel slightly out of control. I don’t like being out of control and I don’t like being out of balance….so personally, while I LOVE my job, I was not loving the way I was feeling.

I was sort of getting frustrated with myself since I couldn’t figure out a way to make it all work…hoping I could schedule it all in. And then at church today I was reminded….

That we need to do our best….not do everything perfectly. In Psalm 145 the writer goes in to detail of what God is. My pastor has been doing a series on this chapter for a couple of weeks now. Today it was on verse 17….The Lord is righteous in all His ways. That means in all He does….it’s going to be best and good and right for us. Because of that…we are accepted. We are loved. We are welcomed and worthy and wanted.

With those words in my heart, I took a deep breath and decided that my job is a blessing. I decided that God doesn’t need a certain amount of blog posts from me in order to use my story to touch lives. He doesn’t need a certain amount of “likes” before He opens a door for me to share His word.

I gave myself permission to exist in His righteousness…..not in Christie’s accomplishments. I humbled my heart to God’s power not my might. I was reminded of a quote someone said in an interview....”Things don’t have to be perfect for life to still be really, really good.”

Thank God for that….and His righteousness that is ours because of Jesus’ blood and forgiveness.