A New Heart

How to start this blog post.

It is one that has been requested over and over.  Many friends keep asking me "what happened"  and so I am going to just sit here and try to type it all out.

It all goes back to Mother's Day

I LOVE Mother's Day.  To me it is a day of sweetness,  nurturing and everything that goes along with Mother's.  Now this was our first year for Mother's Day at our new church and I was so looking forward to what they would do to honor mothers.

So when I opened the bulletin to find that the mother's day activity was

WHAT???  

My first response was not nice at all!!  I was upset and miffed and just well in shock.  See at our church Mother's Day is the last day of our Spring program.  So they normally do something special for the kids.  Well I was super bummed.  And not a very happy camper about the monster truck.  That is soooo not my kind a thing.  It is big, smelly, and noisy.  Goodness if I want that I'll spend the day with my kids!

So I had a bad attitude all the weeks leading up to the "big" day.

Well the "big" day showed up and as normal I took my place in choir.  Which at our church means you sit in the choir loft the entire service.  

Since this was the day our churches revival meeting was to start there was a special speaker named Bruce Frye.  He also sings.  And man does he sing.

He sang a song called Better Than I Deserve with the words

And no matter what tomorrow brings

It's better than I deserve. 

It was such a wonderful song with such a powerful message.  God is so good to us and we do not deserve it. Just another day with life is a blessing from him.

Well the service continued and in all honesty I could not tell you what was preached.  But at the invitation he said something that just struck me so hard.  He said that if you are trusting your prayer and not God you are trusting the wrong thing.  Now I have had post on that issue and the 1.2.3. pray after me mentality but for some reason this hit me hard.  

Was I trusting God and God alone for my salvation or was I trusting in what I was doing or had done?  I mean I had checklists galore.  I had the dress thing covered, the headcovering etc.  But those were all me.  That was my own hand made righteousness.

Ok, God I said.  we can deal with this at home.  But God kept saying No you can't.  Now don't get me wrong,  this was not a high pressure invitation from the man leading the invitation.  I have been in services like that before and knew what that was like.  This was something soo new.  

If we deny God before men, that passage of scripture kept running through my mind.

Ok,  I'll go forward tonight.  See I was still on the platform and I didn't want to get up and disturb the service.  And why couldn't I have just taken care of things between me and God right where I was.  All I know is God wouldn't allow it.

At this point I remember God saying,  What if this is the last time I call you?  It wasn't a loud threatening thing.  It was a small, gentle, sad voice and I started to cry.

I looked up and say my dear friend Lori sitting close to the front so I stumbled out of the choir down the platform and to her.  She asked if everything was ok and I said NO,  I need the Lord!!

Well I did not know it but her husband had been a youth pastor and realized the same thing I had.  He had been doing the church thing and just never done the main thing!  Praise the Lord for guiding me to someone who would understand.

I prayed and poured out my heart to the Lord! And the sweet spirit that came over me was something I had never had before.  Something that has not left and something I never want to leave.

It has been so hard to write this as I had gone on as if I was the Lord's,  not out of a deceptive heart but an ignorant heart.    And yet I fell the need to declare what wonderful thing the Lord has done for me!

I am nothing but I praise the Lord's name cause he is so good to me!!