Beyond The Garden has moved to a new site!

Hi fellow followers!

I've moved my blog to a new hosting site. I'll no longer post here, so if you'd like to continue to follow, please check out the new site at beyondthegarden.net. There is a box on the right side that allows you to enter your email address in the "follow by email" box. This will allow you to continue to receive new posts in your inbox. All of the content of this blog is there so you won't miss a thing.

Please be patient as we refresh and build the new site. I believe God will do amazing things in this season, and I look forward to sharing that with you! As always, I'll continue to post on facebook, instagram and twitter so feel free to follow there!

Much love!

xoxo
-Nicole

Finding joy in your everyday life

All too often we look for joy in the "big" things in life....marriage, anniversary, birthdays, a new house, a new car, a new job, a promotion, a new business (as you can see, we find joy in pretty much anything "new") and so on.... We've been trained by religion to look for God and His fingerprint in all things BIG and SUPERnatural. 

While God is very much in the BIG things, when we are trained to only recognize him there (or even to more easily recognize Him there) we are more prone to take for granted all the other great things about our lives. We are also more easily discouraged and dissatisfied in the "between" times.  

Because big things often come to us seasonally, they give us a "big high" and from this "feeling" we sing praises and express prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving. But even this is temporary.  As soon as the "high" wears off, which happens when the new thing becomes common to us, we begin to look for the next high. 

You see, we are very greedy. No matter how much we say or sing about being satisfied in God, we are rarely satisfied.  Our desire for more from God is insatiable. We always want more. 

We want him to take us from one "high" to another and when He does not do this as quickly as we like, we allow our love, trust and faith in Him to become tainted by our greed. In our self-centered view of God, we are convinced He is a loving Father and Provider in times of abundance, and we are convinced He is uncaring, absent or asleep in times of lack.

Never mind what He has already done for us. As soon as the next "seeming crisis" hits our lives, we are back to asking Him "where are You?" Regardless of the blessing we just received, as soon as another self-defined need arises, we are backing to asking, "when will you meet this need and why haven't You done it yet?"  

We are infected with selfishness, pride and a lack of gratitude because we were born in the flesh.  And when religion was formed, it connected with our flesh and taught us that we could manipulate God using our praise and thanksgiving to provoke Him to do what we want. In our flesh, what we desire casts a shadow over who God is ,and our praise & worship is shaped according to how we feel about Him at the time. This is not why we were created. Who God is should provoke our praise & worship and out of that flows everything we need and a lot of what we desire (let's be honest, not everything we desire is good)!

It's a life long battle so long as we live in the human body, so we must have a strategy to overcome this self-centered disposition.  The key is finding joy in the daily happenings of our lives instead of waiting for the next big thing.  We don't do this automatically so this has to be an intentional effort on our part. We have to practice not allowing our everyday lives to become routine, mundane and common to us.  

There is so much about your life that is already a miracle! I'm often amazed at how quickly I forget how far I've come. It was not so long ago that I was unhappy, unfocused and outside of the will of God.  One of God's greatest miracles was cleaning ME up!  Not to mention that despite the mess I made of my life for years, He turned my mess into purpose, worked my mistakes into my destiny and blessed my life beyond what I even thought was possible!!!

And yet, here I am, day after day, praying for Him to do more...to provide me with the next "urgent" thing I need from Him.  Don't get me wrong. As our Father, He desires for us to come to Him with all of our needs and even all of the desires of our heart. It's His good pleasure to bless us with the good things of life.  

But I encourage you to take a moment to survey the "good things" in your every day life.  Don't look for joy only in the supernatural. Find joy in the moments of your daily natural life.  That moment when your child gives you a hug for no reason or calls just to chat about nothing. That moment you share a laugh with your husband over something silly. That moment you realize that even though you don't talk to your friend all the time, when you're together, its like you were never apart. In those quiet moments at home when everyone is asleep. 

Sister, there is so much joy in your life. The enemy would love nothing more than to shield it from you with your own desire for more.  He loves to exaggerate what you're missing and down-play what you have. Don't allow this.  Purposefully look for the joy of the Lord in everything.  It is there and it truly is your strength in those times of lack, discouragement and waiting.  Look for it on purpose and never ever allow yourself to get in your own way of seeing God's miracles every day...every.single.day.