Surprise!

You never saw it coming, did you?! I could pretend that I haven't blogged in 7 months because I was waiting for the perfect level of suspense, but I think we all know that'd be a lie, and truthfully I'm just a total slacker in keeping this thing updated. I could spend the remainder of this post telling you the updates from the past 7 months, but instead I'm going to write about something that got me thinking this morning...

I recently started a new study called Believing God written by Beth Moore. I'm on week 2, and it's already stretching my thoughts on faith. Today, she used a phrase that really jumped off the page at me: "pleased to redeem". The context of this was whether or not we believe that God is willing, able, and pleased to redeem anything in our life for our good, and His glory. When I read it, I realized that I think He is willing and able, but I don't necessarily believe He is "pleased" to redeem anything in my life, including my past failures. I've kinda been operating under the assumption that He just forgives my failures and then tries to use what's left. I've never pictured Him as being pleased to redeem them. Pleased: as in taking pleasure from. I'm gonna have to let that one work on me a little, but my initial thought is that this completely changes my view of how He looks at me.