BELIEVING THE LIES

You saw me before I was born. 

Every day of my life was 

recorded in your book. Every 

moment was laid out before 

a single day had passed.

(Psalm 139:16, NLT)

I'd been struggling with my bible study homework on the topic of recognizing and breaking free from the lies we believe and replacing them with truths from God's Word. Trying to discern what really is a lie and what I wish was a lie, but really isn't.

There are things in my life that look as though they will never change, but the Lord has been showing me that they are changing--I'm just missing it because it's not happening the way I expected/wanted it to.

Sometimes things are very intricate. It's not always just about me, but rather about the part He created me to play in His story, and how He may allow one thing to happen to bring about another, and it's only in retrospect that I get to understand why things played out the way they did.

It's all about trusting that no matter how things may be looking in the natural, God is in control and working everything out according to His perfect plan. It's about remembering that even though it may not seem so perfect to me at this particular moment in time, it's because I'm just seeing an incomplete part of it. Only He sees the end from the beginning.

Once again the Lord has used one of my plants to illustrate a point. I'm thinking of my tomato plant out on the balcony. Despite being invaded by this year's plague of spotted lanternflies that stripped it of most of its leaves, it has continued to do what it was created to do without giving any thought to lies suggesting it would not be able to survive the infestation.

It was a late bloomer, but has produced (and is still producing), the best crop of cherry tomatoes I've ever been able to grow. Although it's not a bumper crop by any means, there's at least a couple every day that are ready to be picked, and they are perfectly healthy and delicious--unlike previous years when they had blossom end rot or some other such deficiency-caused blemish.

My friend, who know much more about plants than I do, claims it's because the lanternflies have kept the plant naturally pruned, destroying the leaves on it, so that the tomatoes could get all the nutrients they needed. 

To me, that is a good illustration of something that does not look so good at first serving a good purpose after all.