Love, Lo

  This is  the second volume to the book i interviewed earlier.  this book volume is more on giving and creating wealth and thinking long term.  I really liked Eberle’s list of areas of giving. It helped me to put a lot of things into perspective on generosity and what that looks like combined with financial wisdom and a prosperous mindset.  I was raised by extremely generous parents and was exposed to ministries where generosity was highly valued, and even though I had been exposed it before, this book exposed mindsets that I had in that area that were not healthy.   

  I just finished this tonight.  It is a quick read, but this is a powerful book.  I felt considerably freer and able to recognize areas of my life that needed changing from a poverty mindset.  I highly recommend this book.

I had dinner with a friend right after I had read a good portion of it, and I was talking about it to her, and she even noticed a change in me before I had said something, but didn’t know what to attribute it to.  

Eberle’s take on living out of prosperity is largely based on living out of the authority God has given to you as an individual.  A lot of it was new for me even though I have been learning about generosity and prosperity in greater measure this year and I found his point of view extremely refreshing.   In a few hours it has shifted a large majority of how I’m thinking about the money I make and how i plan on spending and saving it. 

For a while I have been wanting to take time to read each book of the Bible in one setting, and to really take it in as a story. This summer, I feel like I finally have time to give it the attention that I want to, and so I started with Genesis this last week.  I actually read it in two sittings this time, but they were still close enough together to get the full effect of the book as a whole.  Thus, in an attempt to catch up on my 52 in 52 i give you Genesis. Below is my reflection and experience through Genesis as a story.  I most likely will want to edit and organize/revise this better later, but here it is in its beginnings ;) :

As I was reading Genesis as a story, I couldn’t help be gripped by two things: beginnings and freedom.  Before I started reading, I thought that maybe I would see creativity  as standing out, but this time that is not what God highlighted to me. 

I was enraptured with the enormity of God’s love.  It consumed me so much that I found myself crying as I read this book of the Bible through a lens I had never viewed it before.   Many read this book as a story of the fall of man.  But this time I saw it as an invitation to intimacy.  God loved us so much that He chose to give us total freedom to choose us back.  All throughout the book of Genesis we see people making choices.  A lot of the choices are poor.  Some are good, and some are redemptive.  Some separate people from the love and blessing that God intended for them.  Some choose intimacy and obedience and obtain favor for infinite generations.

God spoke to me as I was reading Genesis.  He spoke to me in parts that I was struggling with.  I struggled with how he could destroy so many people and flood the earth.  I don’t understand this, because I know Him through the saving and redemptive power of Jesus Christ.  I know Him through His rainbow promise of “I’ll never do that again.”  I don’t know if I understand this or will ever.  But I understand that He loved us so much that He decided not to control us and let us choose Him or not choose Him.  He spoke to me that every beginning in our life, every new thing is an invitation to intimacy.  We have the CHOICE of letting Him be a part of every new beginning in our lives.  We have the choice of greater intimacy in every chapter of our story.

And in the end, He showed me that we can all be Joseph’s.  That He is so redemptive and so powerful that He can use the son sold into slavery to save a nation.  That He can use that same son again to redeem and bring the family that rejected and betrayed him back together.  He can redeem  the not-so-fun stuff in our lives and turn it around to save nations.

He is unchanging in character.  He is Redeemer.  He is the beginning.  He is intimacy. 

In every beginning of our lives, we have an invitation into intimacy.  In everything that we think is over or unredemptive, we have the chance for a new beginning.