Bedtime Story

I want to tell my story too. My name is not important. I’m just another person just like you, trying to figure things out and get by in this world as best I can.

I had a dream once that I know in my heart was a message from God. I knew it immediately, and it has been a blessing to me. As with most blessings of whatever form, they are not for the recipient alone, but to be shared with others. That’s the way God works. So I’m going to tell my story and ask each of you to share it with at LEAST two people on your list, and God will do the rest.

I had entered a period of my life of a lot of soul searching, and I had come to the conclusion that I indeed did very much want to get to know God much better than I had before. I had come to feel very hypocritical in my spirit, over the years, because it had become more and more evident to me that I had not been very faithful to the God I had always professed to love. As I reflected back on my life it was plainly evident to me that He had been there for me all my life, in every traumatic and difficult event I had ever encountered. I wanted to be what He wanted me to be. I knew instinctively that this was not going to happen over night but my heart was in it like it had never been before. I was determined, you could say, but I had a problem. I didn’t know where to start or how to go about it. “Yes, I can read the bible “ I thought to myself.

And I wanted to even though a lot of it was hard for me to understand. I knew I had done a lot of other difficult things before so why not this. There really wasn’t any reason why I couldn’t. After all, I had all the rest of my life and God to help me. But I really was puzzled about one thing. Who knows, maybe this one thing is part of what took me this long to get to this point --- I wondered if in fact it was “weird” to be a person who reads the bible “all the time”

I knew that if I was going to learn what God wanted to teach me, It was going to take “getting in there” and working at it. I didn’t want to be a “Holy Roller”

after all. What would people think of me if they knew how I was now feeling about my awesome God? Will they look at me strangely and think I’m “really out there?”

If I want to talk about my creator and all He’s done for me and all I’m learning ---[ like anyone normally would any other subject that they are passionate about and want to share feelings ]--- would that be wrong? Another thing I had been feeling was lonely. It’s like being at this exciting birthday celebration or something and almost no one wants to come and share it with you.

It’s hard to explain but all these things were going through my mind, I was just in this funny place I had never been before. It was exciting but uncomfortable. I was puzzled but I was not confused about what I wanted. Even with all my fears and uncertainties I had come to realize that my God deserved the best I could give Him even though I knew it wasn’t much. I did know that It would be enough for Him if I could just figure out what the really right ‘amount’ would be, or the right way to go about it would be, with all considered. In a nutshell I was stumped.

One morning upon awakening, a picture came into my mind. It was of a pair of hands with dirty fingernails placing themselves in water --- Staying in the water.

As they stayed there the dirt from under the nails slowly dissipated from under the nails and gradually became clean. There was also a message with the picture:

“Stay in Me and I will cleans you. It matters not what anyone thinks.” I knew immediately, even in my sleepiness, that this was my answer!!!!!!! This thing that had been troubling me for days if not weeks was in an instant clear as a bell, and more exciting than that, it was directly from heaven! My God had answered my

hearts cry. I was so happy and so amazed. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It was a reassuring touch from God. And I was instantly at peace with the subject. I have reflected back to that many times and what I also realized from that picture story He gave me is: It’s my responsibility to do what I know to stay in Him. It’s His responsibility to cleans me. It’s a process and I can’t do it alone. Only He can do it as I allow Him to and place myself in a position so that He can. I have to be available and submissive and obedient and that enables Him to be able to bless me and make of me what he wants. That puts me in the awesome purpose of God. It’s His power that does it all; I just need to be available. And all these years I have not understood what “laying my life down for Christ” really meant. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. I’m not sure. It did sound rather intimidating. I had not grown up in a home that demonstrated it and I didn’t

have a clue. Now I finally know, it’s not scary at all. In fact it’s all I didn’t think it would be. It’s wonderful to know I really am in a place with God where my life

has more meaning than it ever has. I will never feel useless or troubled about if I should be doing this or that because I know my God will direct me to do what He wants. And it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks, it only matters what He thinks. THE END --- OR I SHOULD SAY --- THE BEGINNING.