A Different Look at Romans 12...

My older sister always says that Romans 12 is her favorite chapter in the whole Bible. She says she could read it over and over. I was reading it tonight, and the version in The Message really got me thinking.  I love the way just the first few verses are worded...

"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life--your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking-around life--and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

I mean, how much of my every day life--my sleeping, eating, going to class, going to workouts, etc.--do I spend actually being intentionally conscious that all of it is a gift from God, and I should give every bit of it back to Him? So my challenge for myself is to spend one day, just one, trying to be constantly conscious of His presence. And after that one day (I'm doing this tomorrow, by the way), I'd like to look back on the "God moments," and be able to reflect and just spend some time being reminded of His constant presence. I think it's so easy to go about our daily lives and forget that He's ALWAYS there. He's not just with me when I have my morning quiet time, or say my bed time prayers. He's there when I'm sitting in class hardly paying attention, and when I'm dropping f-bombs at practice when I get frustrated. It's actually a little bit intimidating when you really think about him being "omnipresent." But at the same time, it's awesome!

So tomorrow I'm going to do my best to be conscious of God's presence the entire day... starting at treatment in the morning, through class, soccer, and whatever the rest of the day brings. Tomorrow night I'm going to list my "God sightings" from the day... and we'll see what happens! If you're reading this, I want to challenge you to try to do the same. And like it's written above in Romans 12, "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out."

To be continued tomorrow, I guess...