Have you ever noticed before a huge blessing in your life things seem to fall apart? Sometimes we don’t know a blessing or an answered prayer is about to take place but it can be easy to see all the things falling apart. When something big, something great, is coming-that’s when the refrigerator quits, the car messes up, the basement floods, a layoff happens, the dryer no longer dries or any other myriad of annoyances take place.

I’ve been talking to God about this a lot lately because I know the word He dropped in my heart for me and my husband for 2017: this is our year of jubilee.

This is the year we get back everything the devil destroyed and stole from us. Seven years ago my dad passed which had an avalanche effect on our lives in all aspects. That story is for a different day but it has been seven years of recovering from it.

A year of jubilee is exciting. Restoration is a great thing. Since the first of the year, it feels like it has been an uphill battle. So I asked God a question in my prayer time, “God, why are we stuck?”

That is the feeling both me and my husband have had, stuck. We know we are moving on to greater things so why haven’t we yet? What’s the hold up? When I asked God this question, he answered. There were two things that were keeping us right where we were at in life. Here was His response.

“You cannot leave unfinished business. There are two vehicles sitting on a family member’s property that need to be taken care of and you have to take care of it.  The other thing I instructed you to do was to minimize your belongings. You’ve started but you haven’t cleaned everything out like I said to.”

I immediately repented. I had talked about the two cars. I kept saying something needed to be done about it but never actually did anything about it. As for cleaning things out of the house, I had done a little here and there over the past year but not top to bottom and corner to corner like I knew I was supposed to.

After I repented, thanked God for His mercy and grace, I started a plan of action. I had another family member who would be able to take care of one of the cars that needed to be junked so we made arrangements to meet him. In that meeting, the junk car got picked up and we sold the other. Where I thought taking care of one car would be all we accomplished that day, God stepped in and made it all simple and took care of the entire thing. When I make the effort, God swoops in and makes life easy.

Next task is minimizing our belongings. I found a nifty 40 day cleaning template that allowed me to divide our house up into 40 areas so the task wouldn’t be so overwhelming. Where this is something that I should have been doing for the past year, the template came in handy to keep me from feeling so overwhelmed with it. It’s working. This will be complete before March 1^st gets here. I’m not sure of the importance of this but I know it is.

So, with this question being answered and me working on it, everything seemed like it started falling apart in every other area of our lives. I asked God about this. He reminded me of people in the Bible like Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Mary (Jesus’ mother), even Jesus,  and the trials they all went through before dreams were fulfilled and blessings poured out.

Everything in their lives seemed to be going down a path furthest away from their blessing or promise. Things they were required to do and accomplish were not always easy and sometimes didn’t make sense. Noah built an ark for a flood beyond anyone’s imagination. Abraham faced many challenges and is one of the greatest known people of the Bible. Moses took a bunch of whiny people and wandered around a desert for 40 years among other things. David, wow. Just read his story. Mary faced the possibility of stoning and having her life turned completely upside down when she accepted her calling. Jesus, well, if you don’t know the story yet, take a look at the New Testament.

And here I am trying to figure out how not to be overwhelmed by cleaning a house.

We are able to make our way through this life with all of its annoyances because we know on the other side of the mountain, we get blessed. If we know Jesus, we know there is a promise and we work towards that promise every minute of every day.

I know this year is our year of jubilee. It may not look like it at the moment but I have faith and I know God’s promises. His plans and thoughts are of peace and not disaster to give me a hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11). He has to have my cooperation through it all though. He’s a good Father.

 

Mark 11:23 KJV

For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.