Leah had to learn to surrender her pain.

She held on to her unloved state with both hands griped tight. Oh, how she wanted love. “Children will surely bring it my way”,she thought.

However Leah soon found out, her beautiful children couldn’t be used as tools to gain love. God never gave up His pursuit on Leah and He will never give up on you. 

You may have tried to gain love in all the wrong ways. 

What you thought was real proved to be more disappointments.  You probably compromised your original values believing it was okay if it brings you love.  Yet, soon you realized it was another empty road of despair. 

Sisters…God never gives up His pursuit toward us because we belong to Him.  He wants to teach us how to thrive during our barren times. Thriving is living and soaring above the mess…especially an unloved mess.

Leah was unloved and God knew. 

He knew and He moved with action to come to her rescue.  God didn’t remove Leah from her situation.  Instead, He revealed how much he loved her right where she was. 

God blessed Leah with beautiful children; however, the blessing that transformed her mind was when He taught her how to soar above her circumstances and worship Him.  Amazing! 

This week, we will see how Leah’s unfilled longings lead to a surrendered heart toward God.  We will also discuss how she almost missed God’s great blessings and His great love.  

Sister’s let’s be brave. 

Choosing to surrender when the world tells us different is brave and beautiful. You are valued and loved.  Walk in this truth….but most of all…walk in His love. 

 “God takes everything in our lives and uses it for the good of His kingdom” (Unloved, pg. 57).

“Under three things the earth trembles, under four it cannot bear up: a servant who becomes king, a fool who is full of food, an unloved woman who is married, and a maidservant who displaces her mistress” (Proverbs 30:21-23).

Leah was unloved.

This wasn’t something she imagined, God recognized it.

God is always concerned about the conditions of our life.  He loves us and values us beyond our imagination.  We are valued because He has created us in His image with freedom to choose and a capacity to love and be loved.

He has placed with us an innate desire to be loved, however, many are moving on this earth without love and hope.  Jesus came to bring us hope but not only hope, He sacrificed His life for the sake of love.  “For God so loved the world, that He gave His Son” (John 3:16).

Our life thrives on God’s love and hope.

His love is designed to energize us, motivate us, and encourage us to persevere during the tough seasons in life. Without God’s love, we would be utterly lost.

There are women who feel all hope is lost because they are missing God’s love from their life.  That’s where we come in.  We are called to be God’s hands and feet.

“We are Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Corinthians 5:20). God wants to use us to make an appeal of His love and salvation to the hurting in the world.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)

God commands believers to love and it is their choice to obey.

He requires us to have the compassion of Christ when it comes to dealing with the unloved (Page 34).  The best way to show God’s compassion is to love with action.  Ladies need to see God’s love through us in action.

God’s light shines through us when we sacrifice our time to show love to a co-worker suffering in a hard marriage or a single friend going through a season of loneliness.  We can say to the unloved, “God loves you”; however, how much better it is if we take time to show them the love He showed us.

Take time this week and look

for ways to spread sacrificial love to someone.  This means you may have to look deeper than what appears on the surface.   Every woman is worthy of God’s love.

Feelings of being unloved can be real and not a figment of someone’s imagination…

I. Laid. Sod.

Yup, all by myself. This girl, right here. I did a good job, too! My husband could not get over how great it looked…oh he of little faith.

And then I went on summer vacation…In Houston, Texas…With a broken sprinkler system…For 2 weeks. Upon my return, I found mostly dry, yellow straw where my gorgeous, green grass used to live.  Needless to say, I was heartbroken.  I had been defeated.  Consequently, I surrendered my efforts and gave up on my once-beautiful (and nearly-professional!) lawn job.  My grass had stopped growing, but my indifference was sprouting up like a weed!

I no longer cared for my sod.  I stopped watering it even though I knew that I might have been able to save it with just a little love. But, I refused to love it.  I stopped checking on it all together.  I even went so far as avoid that part of the yard.  It’s not that I was angry or upset with the sod, I mean come on, it is just sod.  The reality was that I just didn’t care anymore.  I destroyed what was left of my sod by separating it from myself.  It had died because I had stopped loving it.  I didn’t “do” anything to destroy it, I just stopped caring for it.  My indifference caused it’s destruction.

You see, you don’t have to hate something to destroy it.  The opposite of love is not hate…  It’s indifference!  Love creates, but indifference destroys.  A simple and often justified attitude of indifference can bring unintentional consequences into our lives.  I didn’t kill the sod by hating it…  I killed it by no longer caring for it.

Love is an action.  Love is a verb.  It creates and sustains, that’s what love does.

1 John 4:8 tells us that, “The one who does not love, does not know God, for God is love.” 

God is not indifferent. God is love!  Love must create and God is the creator of the universe.  He created us and He sustains out of His love.  The fact that we exist is simply an expression of God’s greatest moral attribute… Love!

This is why you and I were made, as an expression of God’s love, because if God is love and love must create, then God must create.  Saint Theresa of Avila said, in her work Way of Perfection, “The primary purpose of creation is that God wishes to bestow love and teach love, so that creatures can share in the blessedness of divine life, of loving and being loved.”

Isn’t that an awesome concept?  God had to create us.  He didn’t have a choice!  God is love and love must create… Wow!  God wants us to know Him and experience His love.  He desires to have a personal, intimate and loving relationship with us.  Through our personal relationships with Him, He uses us as the primary agents, so that, through us, His love might be carried to others.  This is why it is so important that we not let indifference and complacency take root in our lives.  We must weed it out!  Our love should always be in motion, always doing, always creating.  The same way that my indifference destroyed my sod, our indifference towards God can destroy our lives and rob our joy.  If we are not actively imitating God’s love then we are not in fellowship with Him.  If we are not in fellowship with Him, We… Will… Die!  It’s that simple.  But, God is love, He is not indifferent and He wants us to prosper spiritually while on this earth.  Ultimately, He created us so that one day we might live in eternal fellowship with Him in Heaven.  God’s Word assures us of His promise…

Isaiah 40:8 says, “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God endures forever.

Guest Blogger Ali Martin

This morning I got on the scale for the first time in…well…a while. I’ve been telling myself that I need to do it for quite some time and frankly…I just did not want to know. It is the same thing I did last week when I wanted to cancel an appointment at the dermatologist where I was to get a full body screening for skin cancer because…I just didn’t want to know.  Everyone puts stuff off because we don’t want to know how it will change our lives and we don’t want the accountability. Continue reading →

Usually it doesn’t take much for me to get motivated: the smell of coffee motivates me to buy a venti-upside-down-decaf caramel macchiato, a rainy day motivates me to clean my house (yah, this is weird), and least I forget, an extra 40%-off-the-whole store sale at Chico’s motivates me to go shopping! (Okay, too much motivation). But my point is that sometimes our motivation to shop, eat, and work is rather simple.  Continue reading →

Recently, my two boys and I visited my sisters lake cottage.  I was excited to show my boys what a trip to the lake was all about since this is something I frequently got to do as a child. Being that my children are newly 4 and almost 2 and do not know how to swim, I strapped on their life jackets as soon as we got out of the car.

After a high-speed boat ride, given by my adrenaline-junkie-brother-in-law, we decided to take all the kids to the giant water trampoline anchored to the floor of the lake in front of their cottage.  The kids loved it!  They were jumping around having a fantastic time while Mommy tried to keep them from flying off the side into the water.

Believe the impossible!

It’s easier said than done. I tend to keep my heart guarded – afraid to pray big because of silent fear. Afraid to challenge myself, afraid to really listen to God, afraid that He might take me someplace and . . . . I fail. Not because of His inadequacies but because of my sin tendencies.  It’s comfortable and safe to do the same secure thing. 

Too much little faith God! Please teach me. Continue reading →

When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, “Do you wish to get well?” John 5:6 (NASB)

A man was paralyzed and sick for thirty eight years. In John chapter 5 (John 5:2-9), it says he would lay by the pool called Bethesda and watch as hundreds of blind, sick, and lame people went into the water sick and came out healed. This man desperately longed for someone to carry him into the stirring waters so he too could be healed. Lying by the pool one day, Jesus saw him and asked, “Do you want to be healed?” Continue reading →