Today my oldest living brother turns 80.  He is 6th from the oldest of my siblings.  I have a sis just older than him who turned 82 in July.  The first 4 are gone along with the one who drowned.  I know that death is inevitable but when this side of it is coming closer to home, it does awaken me to the reality of humanness.

I think you know I’ve been journaling to my Heavenly Father for the past few weeks.  In doing so He is presently helping me understand the difference between human-living and spirit-living.  I’m no scholar in this arena, but I have always been a person who wants to make something taught to me practical for me.  This is what I feel God is wanting to do with these topics.  Human-living is dominated by sinfulness and the effects of sin.  Death is one of them.  Pain and suffering are other results of sinfulness.  Secrecy is another result of this nature.  Now compare these to their counterparts in spirit-living.  Spirit-living is set free upon death for it is eternal; pain and suffering become discipline and light to be shed upon the parts of life needing examined in spirit-living; secrecy becomes a story to be told about how God has used our human life to help others overcome their own.  Our growth in our spiritual life is never to be held as a secret.  God wants us to use it for His Spiritual Work in the lives of others.

Somehow I’m seeing this secrecy issue as one our church, our present Christian population needs to examine.  We tend to keep our struggles (our pain and suffering) within so others are not “bothered” by our problems.  God is wanting us to share them so others don’t feel isolated by having the same or similar ones.  God also wants us to share our burdens one with another to support each other.  We have moved so far away from this except in the privacy of our own little conversations with someone we think we can trust.

The longer I walk in this new creation God has given me the more I am realizing just how much I have always longed to be this free.  Our secret shame, our troubling mind and thoughts, our present actions that may be sinful are only examples of things God wants us to share “one with another”.  His Holy Spirit is waiting for us to surrender our pride and humanness so He can take charge of our daily living.  It is then that we can become truly a servant to God and a helpmate to each other.  I am wanting to grow in this area with God breaking down these barriers I have built for so long in my life.