Whatever happens, don't go forward with regrets. Keep trucking along and know that God's plan and your life aren't predestined. God put you here for a very particular reason, sure, but whether or not your current, carefully laid plans work out has no bearing on whether or not God will accomplish His own plan through you.
God makes us as tools to further the Plan of His Creation. God chooses us like colors in a pack of colored pencils. If he made you red, and he needs the color red at this stage his work, he will pick you up and see if you have kept yourself sharpened. If you are dull, and unwilling to do as he designed you, he will break out the blade and sharpen you himself. If you consistently refuse to do as he intended, forcing him to sharpen you time and time again, then after he is done with your color he will cast you aside and forget about you until such a time you have repented, sharpened yourself, and he finds you again having placed yourself among the pack of colors, ready to put on the finishing touches of his wonderous Creation. If you do not repent, God absolutely will mix others to fill the void you left, disappointed and broken-hearted that what he made had abandoned him.
God will never abandon you. We abandon God by not asking for His Merciful forgiveness. There is no measure of time, space, or thought for how quickly God can forgive. It is solely up to us to deny the sins of our Self, take up the burden of our Cross, and follow Him.
You can do no permanent wrong so long as you keep yourself sharp for the Lord. There will be times even when you are sharp where the nib of your point is broken off in the excitement of God's passion for Creation. These are the low times, where we all struggle for seemingly no reason. God will not rub you to the wood. He will finish using you to the point you can bear, put you lovingly back among the family of colors, and he will give you time to sharpen yourself once more.
Do not think he has abandoned you when times are hard -- for it is in those times that your splendidly tinged leaden core is being used to color His Masterpiece. When times are calm, that is the time to sharpen yourself, repent of your sins, and prepare for when God will take you from the pack again to draw our Paradise here in the waking world.
What a great post fren, many thanks!!
BEAUTIFUL!! PRAISE THE LORD. God bless u for sharing your heart with us. We are in this together
So true in all ways. When you are His, He will use you. And it is for work that is not of your hands but of His hands. His Will be done.
Angels are like colored pencils without the wood. They require the delicate hands of God to not be broken in use, but are timeless and cannot but help to offer their colors when they are called upon. Like us, they too must stay sharp, but their knees are forced to bend when called upon, as they have no body of wood to hide within.
Beasts and animals are like colored pencils, but their spirit does not know how to sharpen themselves. It requires God or Us to sharpen the spirit and body of a beast such that it can do good works. They are more akin to brushes which must be dipped in the loose, crumbled lead pigment of the Holy Spirit and guided by the Hand of God in order to leave a mark.
Humans, however, are full colored pencils covered in a body of wood. This is why we are greater than the Angels and the Beasts. We have a shell, and without that shell we are not ourselves. We have a core, and with that core, God has given us the ability to sharpen ourselves.
Our bodies are a part of us, and not merely a vessel. A Captain and his Ship are wed to one another in matrimony, and the pain in the heart of the bow can be felt in the heart of the Captain. On the open sea, in the middle of storms, the Captain and his Ship are as one, because they will either survive or perish as one.
Our flesh can be broken, bent, torn, malformed, and dirty, but it protects our Soul, our inner core, from all harm at all times. Only from within can corruption of the soul take hold.
But we are mortal because of it. When the wood of our bodies withers from time or is eaten by the toils of this world and our own doings, our bodies will fail and our Soul will feel naked for its loss. In the Resurrection, God will refuse the splinters of our wood, and it will be grafted once more to our souls, but this time it will be a Living Wood instead of a dry twig, severed from the Vine during the Fall. It will grow around our souls and never permit the soul to be naked again.
All our bodies will be as one, connected once again to the Vine and the Roots of God will nourish us forevermore.
We will be as Adam was before his Fall, perfect to others as we are in the eyes of God, and our vessel will mend itself on its own just as we now mend our points when we sharpen ourselves for the Lord. The Vine of God will carry life to our bodies, and the Holy Spirit will be carried upon the Life and renew the pigment of our cores, our Souls.
I do not believe this time is upon us. We are in but one season upon seasons. We are ending the minor season of harvest, within its own season of growth, and moving toward the final third Order of Creation. We are ending the season of Growth's Harvest and entering into the season of Harvest's Planting.
We are now shifting into the Planting Phase for the final, third act of God's Creation. We will plant seeds and draw up plans for the Final Harvest, when God will declare the Triumph of the Fruits of Labor. That time is a long time off now. Those of us here now will long perish before we see our seeds bear fruit, but we will be here to see some of the seeds we've painstakingly planted sprout in the season of Growth.
[1] Planting -> [1.1] Planting, [1.2] Growth, [1.3] Harvest
[2] Growth -> [2.1] Planting, [2.2] Growth, ( [2.3] Harvest ) <- We are here!
[3] Harvest -> [3.1] Planting, [3.2] Growth, [3.3] Harvest