Love Speaks Truth and God is Good

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Love speaks truth and that is not always what we want to hear. But the question I have, is how and when does this happen? Do the rules Is it Kind? and Is it Necessary? still apply? (That was a weird sentence and I seriously doubt it is anywhere close to grammatically correct, so you guys can decide your love for me by whether or not you want to tell me how to fix it to be correct!!! )

I think about these things with love though. Life can be hard and cruel sometimes and sometimes you want to fall down in the ditch and hide and never return, but you need that person to speak words, that feel harsh at the time, but get you up and out of the ditch and facing life again.

Those words for me lately have come from the Psalms. I've been struggling keeping my chin up the last while and my Bible readings have been from the Psalms. So every morning I read about praising the Lord, blessing the name of the Lord, gratitude for the Lord's protection from their enemies and on and on and on. And every morning it seems, I am challenged again to praise and give thanks despite the fact that life is pressing in on me. Now, this is easier to take coming from the Bible. I mean, you can't really argue with the Bible, but what if a friend would have quoted these verses to me? Oh boy, up in arms right away, saying things like, "They don't understand." etc. etc.

But how can I learn to accept the truth spoken to me in love? I'm not even focusing so much today on how to speak the truth in love, I need to know how to accept the truth that was spoken in love or even just the truth that was spoken to me whether it was in love or not.

"A life of love requires that we look in the mirror and give an honest and humble self-assessment." This is a quote from the book that is inspiring these blog posts and I don't remember it sticking out when I read the book, but when I glanced through this chapter to see what the highlighted quotes were this one jumped out at me.

I think honesty and humility is what will enable me to accept the truth. If I honestly look at my own life and recognize that what they are saying to me is true, then I will need the humility to graciously accept that truth and make the necessary changes.

I don't know that any of this comes from that book, other than the quote, but it's what came out as I started to type.




I have been trying every day that I journal to write down things that brought me joy, etc. the day before. My joy this morning is that God was watching over my husband. I wish I had the picture he showed me, but him and a coworker were at a wood mill looking over where to put their loads of wood. The rows were short so they could stand at the end and look down where normally they would have had to walk down the rows to see if there was room. There was one row with an awful pile of wood. Dave remarked that that pile is going to fall over, not really thinking it would. Five minutes later, the pile fell. If they would have needed to walk down that row,..........  I'm grateful to God for protection.

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