Truth be told

As I sat in our little "nook" in the NICU, holding my baby boy and staring into his face, I asked God if he would take him from me.  God's response was that he would protect my children. 

The next day, I was getting ready to leave the NICU to go home and shower and I heard a voice tell me that I needed to stop and kiss my baby once more because I might not get to again. I was terrified. Of course I went back for a kiss, and I believed this voice. And that day, every time I looked at my son, I kept hearing that voice, offering different reasons why I should not believe that I would have much longer to hold my baby.

That night, in my room, I prayed and asked God why he would tell me one thing and then another.  And he told me that he had not. He had only told me that he would protect my children. The other voice was not his.

How easily I had let the enemy in. How easily I had let him steal my joy. The joy of looking at my son and praising God for this child! It made me sick to think of how I believed one lie from the enemy and continued to believe each lie I was told after that. I asked God how this could happen. How I could trust "truth" from anyone but him. Well, truth becomes what we let in to our lives. If I am spending time in the word, and reading THE truth, then I will guard myself against lies. But if I am spending more time reading, watching and listening to things that are not of God, then that will become what my heart recognizes to be the truth.

Recently my scales have shifted and somewhere along the line I stopped listening to k-love (the pledge drive annoyed me and I discovered another station that I liked), and finished my devotional without finding a new one, and allowed my prayer journals to be replaced with a journal for my daughter, and spent time reading things that were entertaining (or spending hours on facebook or pinterest) instead of my reading bible... and gradually I put God aside so much that I forgot what his voice sounds like.

After this realization, I stumbled across so much that shows me that I am not alone in this. In one of the blogs that I follow, the woman is joining a community of people who are participating in a devotional to rid themselves of toxic thoughts. And I have seen several people posting blogs on facebook about '50 Shades of Grey' and the danger of letting yourself get caught up in this type of "entertaintment". Blurring the lines of boundaries is on a lot of minds these days, and it is for this very reason that God warned us to guard our hearts (Proverbs 4:23) ...for from it flows the springs of life.  

I will choose truth. I will choose joy. I will also choose Hunger Games, Vampire Diaries, and Bruno Mars...but I will choose my relationship with God before those things, and not allow them to consume me to the point of not having time for God.