Dead weight...

Dead weight can be defined as an oppressive burden or difficulty, or perhaps something or someone who prevents other people from making progress. People who suffer depression often feel like this.

Yesterday as I was crying out to God, I realized that as I looked at my life, that was how I sometimes felt about myself. I did not feel I was leading others to freedom, to building them up, especially my family. I chose to be a stay-at-home mother, but am a lousy housekeeper. Most of my friends have children who get lessons in music, drama, sports. I cannot afford that. I am no star at being a wife either. I found myself thinking that I was such a disappointment to everyone, I knew they could have a better wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend than what I was offering. More than anything, I was a disappointment to myself. This was not how I envisioned my life. So I laid it out to God. And as I cried, words started pouring out that came from deep within. Poured out. Spent with emotion, all became still. I could now ask God to enter in.
Speak, Lord.

My devotion from Oswald Chambers said, "In the process of sanctification, the Spirit of God will strip me down until there is nothing left but myself, and that is the place of death...Am I determined enough to strip myself of all that my friends think of me, and all that I think of myself?...Once I am, he will immediately sanctify me completely, and my life will be free from being determined and persistent toward anything except God..(1 Thess.5:23-24 -The Message - May God himself, the God who makes everything holy and whole, make you holy and whole, put you together—spirit, soul, and body—and keep you fit for the coming of our Master, Jesus Christ. The One who called you is completely dependable. If he said it, he'll do it! )"

Then in my regular Bible reading, I came across Romans 4: 17b (NIV version)- ...the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were....

Romans 4:17-18 (The Message)...17-18
We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do.

Father, I release once more all that I am to You. In Your power, I ask You to speak life into the dead weight of sin and purposelessness in my life. In Your compassion, send me a reminder of Your love to me. In Your mercy, use me as Your instrument of salvation. In the Name of Jesus, I declare that I am not dead weight, but Your fodder, Your clay, Your child. I am Yours. In Jesus' Name, that precious Name, Amen.