Returning to the land of blog-dom

I closed this blog over 3 years ago when I quit my full-time teaching job and moved back to the Upstate to get married.  Interestingly, another good friend closed her blog about the same time--we were married within a couple of months of each other.  Today I noticed that she recently re-started her blog, and that spark was enough to remind me how much I have missed blogging.  So, I am going to follow her lead and revive this blog as well.

While I have not taught in a traditional classroom since May 2013, I am still a teacher at heart, and I love the opportunities God has been bringing into my life to invest in others through all sorts of teaching experiences.  Oftentimes I'm also on the flip side and learning as God continues to teach me so much about Himself. 

My current teaching life involves discipling some younger women, assisting people in a variety of ages and stages in becoming better writers, acting as an educational sounding board for homeschooling parents and some who are sending their children to more traditional school settings, and training people in a variety of different skill sets, from crafts like knitting to volunteer positions at my church where I work as the administrative secretary.   While this isn't necessarily the road I would have expected for my 30th year of life, it has been both a rewarding and challenging journey.

My learning life is equally varied.  I'm especially grateful for my patient husband who is always by my side regardless of what life throws at us.  I have grown so much as a wife through experience and learning from some wonderful wives whom I'm blessed to know and spend time with--my amazing Mom, my sweet mother-in-law, my best friend Kristin, and so many others.  These ladies also invest in my spiritual life (and pretty much every other aspect of my life), and I'm so thankful for them.   Most importantly, I continue to learn so much from my Heavenly Father, who teaches me more each day about how to live by His Spirit and in His strength rather than my own.

Currently, Kristin and I are reading through The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer.  I read this book as a young teen and was totally overwhelmed by how much insight Tozer had to offer, and recently decided to return and see what more I could glean from his thoughts.  As I chew on the words he wrote several decades ago, I am frequently amazed at how relevant they are today.  I often have to re-read a chapter several times and still I find on another reading that I have not fully grasped the entirety of his message.  This has been both rewarding and also spiritually challenging to me.  How often do I read the Bible with the same hunger--to read and reread the same passage and better understand it each time?  Not often enough, is my conclusion, and I am reminded to immerse myself daily in the truth of God's word.  It has also been interesting that this renewed interest in Tozer's most famous writing is in tandem with my current devotional inductive study of the book of Hebrews.  So much of Tozer's text digs into the symbolism and parallels of the Old Testament worship with New Testament worship, and Hebrews has a similar focus.

Well, I could keep writing, but I think I will close for now with a quote from Tozer that has challenged both Kristin and I in the past few days:

"And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but respond to His overtures. (And this we call pursuing God!) We will know Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by faith and love and practice. 

"O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen."