If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you probably know I’m a reader.  I love to read…so much that my mom once grounded me from reading for a week.  She even took away the cereal box!

In addition to reading the Bible, I’ve found many authors who speak the Truth into my life.  It’s helpful to hear the way the Truth has changed others’ lives.

Here are some of my favorite truthtellers and a few recommended works.

Beth Moore – Breaking Free, So Long Insecurity

Jen Hatmaker – Interrupted, For the Love

Angie Smith – Chasing God

Tim Keller – The Reason for God, Jesus the King, The Prodigal God

Lauren Winner – Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crises

Ravi Zacharias – Recapture the Wonder, Jesus Among Other Gods

All of these books can be found on Amazon and other sellers.  Find them. Read them. Hear and respond to Truth.

The very first book I read in 2015 set a great tone for my year, as I learn to love the Truth.  Every Bitter Thing is Sweet by Sara Hagerty is beautiful and challenging — she speaks of Truth in the midst of hardship — tasting the goodness of God in all things.  I highly recommend the book, but it’s not what I want to share today.

On Sara’s blog and Instagram pages she shares what she calls “Adorations” every day.  These adorations are a result of years of her daily Bible study method.  Simply put, she reads the Truth and then translates it back to praise.  She describes it as “inhaling His word and exhaling praise.”  She publishes these meditations a month in advance.

I’ve started practicing these adorations in my own Bible reading.  This year I’m trying to read the whole Bible in a year, and I find that some books are harder to connect with than others (minor prophets, I’m looking at you).  Now I try to find a characteristic of God within the passage and praise Him for who He is.  Reasons to adore Him are everywhere.

Take today’s reading for example.  I read Jeremiah 31 and found four adorations that I recorded in my journal.

God is my Husband.
God is my father.
God is my Shepherd.
God is my Comforter.

Four Truths that are worthy of praise.

Day 26 of 31 and I’m still going strong! I really can’t believe it.

For the last week of this series I want to start looking at practical ways of walking in Truth.  How do we fill our lives with Truth? How do we learn to love it? How do we keep Truth at the forefront of our minds?

Here’s one that I’ve found recently for those of you on Instagram.  It’s an account called 100 Days with Jesus – each day she shares a Name or attribute of Jesus with a short devotional about what the name or the attribute means.  The words come in alphabetical order and we are counting down to Christmas day.

While this doesn’t replace my daily Bible reading, it is a nice way to have a reminder of Truth right there on my Instagram feed in the midst of browsing.  The posts give me pause to reflect on who He is for a while.

Here are a few that have spoken to me recently:
Guardian of My Soul
Healer
Hope of Glory
Intercessor

The more I surround myself with Truth, the more the opportunity I have see, hear, and live it.

Today I’m sharing some truth that I struggle to believe.  I accept that it is true, but often feel like it’s not proving true for me.  And I often wonder how different my life would be if I fully embraced this truth and walked in it daily.  That’s the goal…to love the truth….to be found walking in the truth.

I’m turning 30 in a matter of months. My mom had four kids by the time she was 30, and while I never had a specific goal of matching her on that front, I always expected that I would be married with children by now.  The reality is that I don’t even have any friendships with single men right now.  I am quite lonely and while I do not mourn my singleness, I do want to be a wife and mother more than anything and I worry that it’s never going to happen.

The hardest part of all this is that during the week I’m not bothered.  I may be single but it makes no difference at work. I am a leader in my workplace.  I am successful and respected.  I am on my way to being a school principal.

But then we get to Sunday and suddenly there’s no hiding. I’m alone. I’m a single woman in the church….and so there must be something wrong with me.  Suddenly I feel like I’m no longer a legitimate adult….that I’m demoted to the bench or the JV squad….that’s there’s nothing that I can help with.

The lies come hard and fast on Sundays.  They say I’m a second-class citizen.  They tell me I still need to sit at the kids’ table.  They tell me I have no place in the body…that I will never belong until I have a husband and family.

Why do I feel this way in the one place I should never question my worth?

And so on Sundays I have to tell myself the truth: I am a daughter of the King. I am loved. I am his workmanship — his masterpiece — his handiwork — created to do good works that God prepared and dreamed up before I was born.  Not only do I have a place and a seat at this table, I have a purpose.  There is a role for me that no one else can fill.  Maybe I haven’t discovered it yet but that doens’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

I belong.  I belong to Him.  I am a treasured part of this family.  And one day I will believe and live it.

Today I just want to share a psalm that brings me to tears whenever I read it.  This truth is so beautiful I don’t even need to comment.  Truth speaks for itself today.

Today’s truth is another that is precious to me.  It goes along well with what I shared yesterday.

God likes us. He delights in us. We are precious to Him.

So He doesn’t just tolerate us and roll His eyes at the mention of our names.  He doesn’t get annoyed by our prayers and requests.  He gives us so much more than our salvation and he doesn’t do it begrudgingly.

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.”

Our God is a God of restoration.  He brings wholeness to every area of our lives.  He doesn’t leave us in the rubble in which He finds us.  He returns what’s been taken and lost.  Wrong is made right.  Things are brought back to the state He intended.

His promise is this: “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten….never again will my people be shamed.”

And this, one of my favorite verses since the summer of 2005.

A lot of times before we can love the truth and walk in truth, we must acknowledge and confront the lies we so often believe.  Lies we think are the truth.  Lies that can easily destroy.

Here’s one lie I believed for a long time: God doesn’t like me.

Sure, He loves me.  Sure, He sent His Son to die for me.  But like me? Not a chance.  Somehow I was sure that He barely tolerated me.  That I annoyed Him.  That when I asked Him for something, He’d roll His eyes and say, “For crying out loud, Allison! I already gave you eternal life! Would you shut up and quit whining and leave me alone?”

I tiptoed around Him for years….desperate to make myself more lovable but with every year feeling more and more ugly and undesirable.

Enough is enough.  There have even been days in the last month that I’ve started living according to that lie.

And so I must tell myself the Truth over and over.

Psalm 18:19 “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me”

He delights in me.  He doesn’t tolerate me.  He doesn’t “just” love me.  He delights in me.

Let’s define that word, shall we?  To delight is to please someone greatly. I please Him greatly?!?!  To delight is to take pleasure in.  I bring Him pleasure.  Synonyms include: to charm, to enchant, to captivate, to thrill….

Can it be?  I charm Him. He finds me charming.  He’s captivated by me.  I thrill Him.  He finds me enchanting.

Wow.

This truth is sometimes almost too wonderful to even believe.  The King of the Universe, the Creator of all things is wowed by ME.

Surely I am precious.  “You like me! You really like me!”

If I believe His words are truth, these words must be also.

Zephaniah 3:17 “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”

I bring Him great joy.  He smiles when He thinks of me.  And He thinks of me often.

Oh, to live every day as if I loved the whole Truth!

God is good. A simple statement but a truth worth repeating over and over.  Sometimes it takes a while to believe it.

He is good…..all the times.
He is good…..in all things.
He is good…..in all he does.
He is good…..in His love.
He is good…..when there is nothing good in me.
He is good…..and is enough.
He is good…..to me.
He is good…..forever.

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

He is a good Father.

I heard this song earlier this month and found the words so comforting….Truth worth repeating when it’s hard to believe.

I am a worrier at heart. I find myself thinking about all the things that could go wrong and play “what would happen if” scenarios in my head all the time.  I suppose you could reframe it and say I am always prepared, but the root of my worry is fear.  What if I can’t handle this? What if I find myself alone? What if God can’t even handle this?

The Truth is that as a daughter of the King, I have nothing to fear.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?….No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Take a look at that list again.  It includes everything we could possibly fear.  Paul says in all these things, we do not have to fear because God’s love is bigger and stronger.  We live in His love.  And John tells us, “There is no fear in love.”

We have nothing left to fear.

Even death.  Death plants us even more securely in His love because suddenly we are with Him and see Him forever.

Paul went so far to call death a rescue — something to be welcomed, not dreaded.

“The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom.”

And so we remain, in His love, with Him as our refuge, with nothing to fear.