Snippets of Thoughts and Revelations

• Tonight driving home from BCM I noticed the beautiful full moon and remembered reading a Facebook post from some missionaries in Mozambique about looking at the full moon through a telescope. The same full moon she saw over Africa is now shining over us...it's just a thrill to remember sometimes.
• I'm doing the Breathe study by Priscilla Shirer. In it she encourages us to journal "big ideas." It's a study on the Sabbath--having margins in your life. So I don't know how I got from there to here, but this is my big idea for this week: if I constantly try to keep my husband and children happy (which I do, feeling like a bad wife/mother when I fail), how will they ever learn to find joy in the Lord? 
•  My pastor was preaching about prayer and how James 4:3 says, "When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with the wrong motives..." selfishly asking for things for our own happiness and comfort. And I thought about these blog posts of my friend Susan, and her mother’s courage in facing excruciating pain day in and day out. And my mother’s courage in facing Parkinson’s –alone—day in and day out. And my pastor’s courage in facing life without his daughter day in and day out. There are so many others!  So why would I think I deserve—just me, because I’m so special—a life free of pain, heartache, or need? God’s presence is my provision, my reward. My answer to prayer.
• And finally, in another sermon, Bro. Mike was talking about when Jesus told Peter that Satan had asked permission to sift him like wheat, and that he would fail, but when he was restored, to strengthen his brothers. It just hit me, even though I’ve probably heard it before, that Jesus knew all along that Peter would deny him three times, and He loved him, chose him, used him anyway. Wow.