Day 22 of 25 Days for Peace. Jabez

I'm finding it more and more difficult to fully express what's going on inside of me over the past few days and in that I'm both frustrated and in awe. As a person who talks for a living, dialogs for a living, it's an interesting experience to be at peace with not being able to fully articulate my heart right now. We're at a new level, friends. A new level indeed.

I was reminded tonight of a book I recently read called Beyond Jabez (which I highly recommend you read). Jabez is only briefly mentioned in the Bible in 1 Chronicles 4:10 and it's in reference to his prayer to God in which he starts with "Oh that you would bless me indeed..." the author points out in Beyond Jabez that the word "indeed" is translated to mean overflowing or abundantly. So, basically Jabez was asking God to flood his life with blessing. Americans offer a double edge sword in this thinking, one side we tell you that it's selfish to say something like that, but we also tell you "you deserve to be happy!"  We want you to have a full and awesome life, but we want you to not enjoy it too much so that we don't feel less than...God's idea of blessing is thankfully different than ours.

Do peace and blessing go together? When I reflect on just the past 48 hours and how I've experienced God moving in my life I don't think I could shout a loud enough YES! I've found it takes a level of courage to fight against the culture (any my own negative tapes) and to actually ask for overflowing blessing...I've also found the blessings come in ways I cannot imagine and occasionally cannot articulate fully.

It's true, this time of year we learn mainly about the birth of Jesus but if I can be so bold as to point you in a different direction, I encourage you to dig into the Old Testament and study an amazing person named Jabez...peace is found under the covering of prayer and his prayer nails it.