faith walk...

As I sit here with crutches, I am trying to clean up my email inboxes and convert them to a new geek gadget service I am working with. EVERNOTE.COM more to come on that.
But I just found notes from a Sunday school lesson I did last year. I'm posting this to my site because for me Back to school time is always a good time to re-evaluate everything.

These notes came from the last time I had to endure foot surgery. Why foot surgery Amy-Jo? It's because my feet just weren't created to last the long haul. In fact I was told I have the feet of a 60 year old woman. So if you see a 60 year old woman with feet half her age---tell her to give them back.
Also my feet got out of line because I took poorly formed feet and pushed them to their limits with track in highschool and college soccer. Now as an adult they won't let me do what i need them to do. I had a hard time moving from pain to surgery to healing to walking forward again. It was quite a hard time for me.
The phases that I went through were as follows:


ignoring: I didn't want to notice the pain so I just kept pushing through.
correcting: I went to extremes in college even with physical therapists creating a bulky plastic protector that was taped to my foot instead of surgery that was needed.

numbness: Finally my foot would go numb from bones moving out of place and pinching on nerves.
surgery: It became mandatory for surgery and a re-allignment and removal of some bones.
crippling: I had a time of complete immobility and had to use crutches.
baby steps: I had to re-learn how to walk and ended up limping for quite awhile.
practice: I had to practice and continue to walk to keep moving forward and stop limping.

To me this was as much a faith journey as it was a physical journey. As I wondered if I would ever be able to walk again...I spent many moments talking with God about it. It became an illustration of my own walk with God.

Where are you on your faith walk?
Is there a question that is crippling your relationship with God
Are you ignoring your relationship with God
Are you numb
are you stalled
are you moving?

Where are you on the journey?
the terminology "relationship with Christ" is not found anywhere in Scripture. We made that up. Instead of that, the Bible talks about a "walk." But here is the interesting thing: the word "walk" in Hebrew means "human locomotion without any indication of destination." So evidently a walk with Christ is more about the process than the end. To walk with Jesus is not to look up every 5 minutes asking, "Where are we going? What is my job going to be? Who am I going to marry? Where am I going to live?" It is to walk. Those questions come up in the conversation as you move together.

I hope you have some time as this new school year begins to think through your walk and talk with Him about it on your way.