​How Do You Hear God's Voice?
How often do you recognize God speaking to you?
When most people think of hearing the voice of God, it's easy to picture Moses standing before a burning bush or the Israelites gathered at Mount Sinai while the entire mountain trembled. For a long time, I thought hearing God had to look like that too. Big, unmistakable, impossible to miss.
As I sit here writing tonight, I'm laughing at myself for believing that for so long.
Only recently have I begun to understand that God is a God who meets us exactly where we are. He speaks in ways that are deeply personal, using things only we would recognize because He knows us that intimately.
I've been studying the book of Amos, and the more I read, the more I realized that this has always been God's way.

I'm a flowers kind of girl.
I mean that romantically and quite literally.
There is something about fresh flowers that brings me an unexplainable amount of joy, whether they're given as a gift or blooming in my own garden. I don't have a particular favorite flower, but I can say I've always loved roses.
When you picture a rose, you probably think of one of two things: its beauty or its thorns.
It's one of the most beloved flowers in the world, yet it's also one of the few that people hesitate to grab because they know it might hurt them. If you walk into a flower shop, some people immediately reach for the roses. Others avoid them altogether, choosing daisies or zinnias because they don't come with the expectation of getting pricked.
I think that's a lot like life.
The way we see things often says more about our perspective than the situation itself.
I've always chosen to see the rose before I see the thorns. One of my close friends is the exact opposite. She can't stand roses because all she notices are the thorns. Neither of us is wrong. We simply see the same flower differently.
It reminds me of the age-old question: Is the glass half full or half empty?
Every day we are given the choice to focus on what is beautiful or what is broken.
That doesn't mean pretending hard things don't exist. Roses still have thorns. Glasses still lose water. Pain is still real.

Why is it a human reaction to mask our feelings?
If someone hurts us, we seek to hurt others.
If someone is playing games, we seek the key to win the prize.
If someone breaks our heart, we seek everything but the one thing that can help heal all of the broken pieces back into place.
It is absolutely true that we all have a God-sized hole in our heart. When someone else breaks our heart, it takes me back to the fall in Genesis. I imagine holding a large glass bowl, and the moment Adam takes a bite of the apple Eve gave him, that bowl falls onto concrete, shattering into who knows how many pieces. Because we are human, we immediately get on our knees and start searching for every broken piece because we assume we can fix ourselves.

Life has a really good way of throwing punches — punches when you’re sad, punches when you’re down, punches when you’re sailing in still waters, and my favorite… punches when you’re happy.
Those tend to come the minute something good happens. The kind that makes you start wondering if good things can really exist without something bad sneaking up from behind to take you out. 
Even as a child of God, it can be hard to handle the punches when they come from all sides and there seems to be no end in sight.

The hardest part about letting go of a sin is remembering the pleasure it once gave you and feeling the flesh pull you back toward it. Temptation doesn’t vanish just because you try to distance yourself. The only way to fully let go is to hand it over to God.
I’m about to be very vulnerable.

Galatians 6:7
“Do not be deceived: God is not to be mocked. Whatever a man sows, he will reap in return.”
I could make a “6 7″ joke here, but the fact that I’m only now learning what it truly means says it all.

John 15: 13-14
"There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command."