Discernment

Last evening I went to the United Methodist Women meeting and our lesson was on Discovering God's Will.  It was a good lesson and really got me to thinking about how in the past God's will for me had been so plain at times and so hidden at others.  One question brought up was should we seek God's will in all decisions big or small?  At first this seemed a ridiculous question, i.e. "should I seek God in the decision to take the trash out or not?"  My first thought was of course not but it really got me thinking very hard and I realized that God wants us in constant communication with Him, even the small stuff.  I am beginning to think He uses the small details to teach us discipline, patience and how to STAY in his presence.  If we can abide in his love on the smallest decisions then we should be able to be there in the larger ones.  Hopefully it can bring about our being more faithful, hearing his voice more clearly and having more peace in our lives.

Pruning

I was cleaning my screened porch and saw that I needed to clean up a couple of flowers in pots beside the door.  I was clipping off the dead flower heads that had gone to seed on this beautiful purple flower.  It had been such a gorgeous plant but now it looked so sad and scrubby.  It brought to mind the bible verse John 15 vs 1-2 where God continually prunes the branches to make it bear more fruit.  I cut away all the dead and suddenly the plant looked happy and quite good.  We are a lot like that plant, we start out really great, but then get start to go to seed and have a lot of dead about us.  If we let God prune away our dead we can again produce good things and start to look good again.