When I wrote Part 1 of “Longer Than The Road I Travel” I was simply overwhelmed with the idea of community in life. And I haven’t stopped being overwhelmed sense.
If you remember back to the first part of this series of posts, I was sharing about a break-out session I lead for a group of middle school and high school girls. When we share this segment at the retreat we talked about how life is tough… that this road we travel isn’t always easy or fun. We gave the girls a chance to fill in the rest of the sentence: “It’s tough being a girl…” The responses ranged from “when boys are idiots” to deep sharing of issues girls face… family problems, eating disorders, and more.
The coolest part was then to remember that God’s love and God’s grace is BIGGER than any of those things. Romans 8:38-39 says:
” 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.”
Absolutely nothing can separate us from God’s love and while life truly is tough at times, he gives us things to help us through the tough times, especially other people. We then took some time to share times in our lives where it was crucial for us to have the help of other women in our lives and then encouraged the girls to write down a few names of peers as well as older women in their lives that they could share life with… be real… not keep the walls up anymore. Because that is one of the ways we see God’s love is longer than the road we travel… through the traveling partners he gives us.
As I mentioned before, this has been a very crucial lesson for me to learn lately. I encourage all of you to stop right now, and write down… actually on a piece of paper, who God has given you to “do life” with. When I did this I listed both peers as well as mentors… both are important. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the people God has placed around me, near and far and realized that by thinking I need to “go it alone” or “have it together” I’m ignoring one of the biggest ways God is telling me “Bekah, I LOVE YOU!” So go call one of the people on your list, thank them for being God’s love in your life, and ask them how life is going as well. We need each other in order to remember that God’s love truly is longer than this road we travel.
(I’m not doing so good with the 5-minutes thing but I have kept it to 10 for the last few posts! More coming soon!)
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