Perfect Love

Some days I resemble the Cat in the Hat on a really bad day.

It's the age old lament of too much to do and not enough time. But I'll go a step more transparent and say that a lot of my problem has been my refusal to sit down for a decent amount of time and be quiet.

I get uncomfortable with the silence.

Especially when I'm afraid of what God is going to show me.

It's easy in the day-to-day to excuse my frustration as understandable, my short prayer time as at least I prayed some, and my busyness as "everyone is doing it" and just part of how it goes when you balance two full-time careers.

But all that sort of evaporates in one silent moment before a holy God.

The funny thing is when I took my pastor's dare to try to spend an hour in prayer each day for a week, I didn't expect anything good to happen.

I expected to feel guilty.

What I experienced was freedom.

It didn't happen that week. But over time...and even when the time I had in the morning shortened...I noticed God still showed up. He still guided my eyes to take in something in His Word that connected.

And I found that confessing sin and praying for my family were no longer times when I felt guilty for all that I've done wrong. They were times I admitted to this holy and loving God that I couldn't do what I was asking to be done~ only He could.

Today, as I was praying for my husband with The Power of a Praying Wife prayer cards by Stormie Omartian, (GREAT book by the way!) I prayed 1 John 4:18 about perfect love driving out all of my husband's fears. And 2 Timothy 1:7 that David would walk in a spirit of power, of love, and of a sound mind.

Then my eyes locked on a note I'd written years before. A year when God was so near I could feel His breath on my cheek.

The note said, "Perfect love creates a safe place."

I long for my husband and children to think of our home as a safe place. A place where love drives out fear and God's perfect love is closer than a whispered dream.

So I prayed for that very thing.

But that note pulled me even deeper. It was as if God were inviting me to see that the safe place is closer than my DNA.

It's real. And the door is always open. The Light is always on.

Even when the darkness of a cave presses in on me and it’s hard to breathe, my Safe Place is still there.

Even when prayer times are short and my to-do list long, I can run into the Perfect Love that creates a safe place.

I still long for my home to be a safe place too. But today I caught a glimpse of the only way that will ever be true.

Christ is the only perfect love that creates a safe place.

This is where I need to hang out and trust God to cause what I learn there to overflow and broaden that Safe Place to wider dimensions than I can even imagine.