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Coming Back the the Basics

I spent this past weekend at a silent retreat. 48 hours of blissful silence. It’s like an introverts dream colliding with an extroverts nightmare. 🙂 That’s dramatic and over the top…..but not by much. 

 
As you can imagine, having that much quiet leaves a lot of time to think about a lot of things, which I did. I’ll just share one of them with you here. 

 
In the midst of many conversations I had with Abba, I found myself thinking about what it actually looks like to reflect the Father. This is something I’ve thought about multiple times in the last few months and here I was again… and then, the obvious hit me, God is Love.
 
What does it look like to reflect love? 

Again, the obvious, 1 Corinthians 13,

 
The Do’s and Don’t’s of reflecting Abba:

DO:

Be patient
Be kind
Rejoice with truth
Bear all things
Believe all things
(in TPT, Never stop believing the best for others)
Hope all things
Endure all things
(in TPT, Never takes failure as defeat, for it never gives up)
 
DON’T:
Envy
Boast
Be arrogant
Be rude
Insist on my own way
Be irritable
Be resentful
Rejoice at wrongdoing
 
There were a couple things in this list that hit me pretty hard! 
 
1. Never take failure as defeat.
First, God doesn’t fail, so how does that make sense? For Him, it must be referring to the failure of others! So, I am not reflecting the Father if I’m taking on failure as defeat, whether that failure is mine or someone else’s. Whoa!
 
2. Don’t insist on my own way.
Well, dangit. How many conversations does that eliminate for me?? As pure as my actions may seem, how often is my motive to get my own way. 
Also, this is how God operates!!!! He never insists on His own way! He always invites us into a better way but never insists that we show up. His way is better, it’s higher, if we choose it, our life is so much more, and yet he never forces us into it. 
If I insists someone goes the way I want them to, regardless of how good my intentions are, how great my plan is, that’s not love. Wow! 

Now, is it a little ridiculous to reduce the reflection of the Creator of the Universe to a list of Do’s and Don’ts?? Perhaps. That is very possible.

But, honestly, I haven’t mastered the things on this list yet, so it seems like a pretty great place to start!