Journal Excerpt Mon 12/13/10

 

Wow. Graham Cooke's Perfecting the Art of Bouncing Back is really messing with me. It's a powerful encompassing teaching. God knew I would buy it because of the Monarch butterfly and title but I didn't know how much I needed it. I haven't even finished the first CD and I have been thoroughly messed with. I'm not going to make it to the exercise room today but this teaching is critical. Graham confirmed that God has placed difficult people in my life so I can grow. It's training, boot camp. Adversity comes to teach us how to claim inner territory [ourselves] and prepare us for warfare. Warfare is taking external territory [the world]. I realize I'm just going to have to take notes from it because everything he says is a quote for Anointed Messages. Lord I thank You for Graham Cooke. Bless him Father.

 

Graham says thank God for the difficult people in your life because they bring out of you what needs to change. He also talked about how seeing the worst in others is very bad. Of course I knew that but I was just thinking about this last night and meant to write it down. I thought about how [a friend] was surprised at who she was [some undesirable traits] but I'd already seen it. And I thought about how too often I've seen the bad traits that others seem to miss. I realized that as a counselor I was trained to see the bad in people. I had to diagnose their issues and I was very good at that. I realized counseling was good training in many ways but that isn't good and I want to see the best of others. Graham pointed out that if you see others' brokenness it's so you can have greater grace and compassion for them.

 

Yes loving difficult people is good practice for becoming the person God sees when He looks at me; the person I AM becoming. And I recognized that if I can't love people like [Christians] then I'm not ready for [the unsaved]. These challenging Christians help me claim my inner territory. [My unsaved assignment] is external territory to be claimed. If we Christians can't love each other how can we love the unchurched? And I'm talking about the universal church - the body of Christ; not church attendance which is not proof of salvation. I'm going to listen to this series several times. I need to put Graham's messages on an SD card too so I can listen through my mp3 player.