Devotions with Pastor Delinda

Dear Church Family:​
"Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me ... restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.” - Psalm 51:10

Deep reflections at play dough time. 

I sat here watching my kids play with play dough, well one of them, the other was eating it.  There are a couple of things that drive me crazy about play dough, I don’t like the colors mixed (call me OCD), the itty bitty leftover pieces after you clean it up and digging it out of a toddlers mouth. 

Today we sat and played with play dough and I looked at this giant ball of mixed up play dough that would normally drive me a little crazy and God spoke.  I could see it for the ugly lump it is (at this point it wasn’t completely mixed so it wasn’t an ugly brown just yet, it was more marbly, but still...) or I could see it as something beautiful in the making.  Like a potter with his lump of clay, I began to break it down and mold it and shape it, and the words to an old familiar song came to mind.

“Change my heart, O God!  Make it ever true.  Change my heart, O God!  May I be like you.  You  are the potter, I am the clay, mold me and make me, this is what I pray.”

The songwriter Eddie Espinosa said in an interview once, “The year was 1982. I had been a Christian since 1969, but I saw a lot of things in my life that needed to be discarded. I had slowly become very complacent. I acknowledged my complacency, and I prayed to the Lord, ‘The only way that I can follow you is for you to change my appetite, the things that draw me away. You must change my heart!’”

I am far from perfect, ask my family, and sometimes I too grow complacent.  Sometimes I require the breakdown, God is molding me, and sometimes it’s necessary to break me apart to put me back together the way He intended. 

I am still a work in progress and always will be as long as I’m on this earth, but my prayer is that God would continue to show me where I can improve and help me to do so.  My desire is to be like Him.  I, like the writer of this song, have been a Christian for a long time (for me it’s much longer than he was when he wrote the song).  There have been many stages of my life where God has broken me down and smoothed out some of the rough edges.  My prayer is that those around me,  in my circles will see Christ in me more and more daily as He weaves the beautiful mess that I am in Him.

Is He breaking you down?  Where in your life do you need to be more like Christ? Where have you grown complacent? Take a few moments today and reflect and pray this scripture (Psalm 51:10 above) and song with me and watch as God continues to mold you into the beautiful masterpiece He has planned.

Love and Blessings,
Pastor Delinda