thinking things about life and Jesus and stuff
Sneaky pride.
It messes everything up.
Pride is behind the anxiety I feel when I prepare to teach. It urges me to meditate on how much I have to lose or gain. Pride nudges me to plan more than I pray. Pride prompts me to flinch in shame when someone talks about sin that hits a little too close to home.
Pride, whether it wears the mask of boasting or of self-deprecation, is constantly beckoning my heart to pull up a chair and watch a story-of-me unfold.
Pride is a soul set on self.
Yesterday I processed why we should want marriage or singleness at all.
Today I thought I’d share some of the implications of those thoughts on my prayer life. I spent some good time yesterday praying for:
(1) An undivided heart in singleness and an obsession to:
Display the spiritual nature of God’s family that grows from regeneration and faith, not procreation and sex
Father, I pray that you would help me not to waste this season of singleness. Let me invest in those around me with as much vigor as mother invests in her children: with passion, prayer and love for those who are your lost sheep.
I hear that question a lot.
Whenever I’m around a married woman trying to break singles of their delusions of marriage by emphasizing the burdens, I hear the single women mumble and whisper to one another: if marriage is so miserable why would we want it? 
The past month or so I have been kind of crazy about Jesus. (Like deeply satisfying-ly in love with Him.) A fear has crept into my heart that I’ve voiced aloud to a few friends: does this new-found joy and peace mean that I’m ‘called’ to singleness?
Yesterday I shared a couple of the things I learned from reading The Real Win. Here are four more thoughts triggered by the book:
3. Men’s sins reveal women’s sins.
There’s a section of the book where Matt and Colt walk through some specific sin struggles that men sometimes face. As I was reading them I found it pretty hard not to mentally scribble the names of men I know in the margins.
Turns out, reading about the struggles of men managed to highlight for me one of the major struggles of women: comparison.
A couple of things you should know about my pastor:
I felt a little strange picking it up since it’s called The Real Win: A man’s quest for authentic success. Despite what some of my blog readers have said, I am not a man. And I’m not really on a quest for authentic success.
