Good morning, Jesus, what are your plans for today?! 

My spirit was alive and ready to engage with Emmanuel and yet my body was still shaking off the night’s sleep.  I closed my eyes as my mind focused on Him and a vision appeared of a woman praying for me. Beginning to ask Jesus what it meant, the thought came that He wanted me to ask this woman at the conference I was attending to pray for me and pray a mother’s blessing over me.  

The day before at the conference, Isabel Allum had talked about waking up every morning and greeting Jesus and asking Him about His plans, and now I had, and now He had shown me, and now I was scared stiff.  

I didn’t know anyone at the conference and nobody knew me.  And now Jesus wanted me to be the weirdo going up to some stranger and asking them to pray a mother’s blessing over me.  Great(!) 

I arrived at the conference and sat down in a similar row to the day before.  I sensed a lady sitting down at my left side and looked up to see the woman in my vision smiling at me and introducing herself.  As she began telling me about herself, I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up - partly because of what she was talking about and partly because God’s grace was so beautiful that I never had to go and introduce myself to a stranger, but instead they came to me!  The poor woman was very gracious with my floods of tears and gave me a big hug and later prayed for me just as had happened in the vision I had seen in the morning. God did a powerful work in my heart that day and it all began with a simple making of space as I woke up. 

God desires relationship with us.  He is so incredibly patient with us as we bumble through our days generally ignoring him and perhaps appearing now and again to read His love letter to us and bark at Him a few requests.  Really, if my relationship with my husband looked like that, we would probably be divorced by now.  

My husband Mark and I live together (obviously) and are around in the house together or out working or resting together for most of the week. But even though we are in the same geographical location much of the time, we have to prioritise relationship.  We viciously guard our date night each week and stop regularly during the day around breakfast, lunchtime or late afternoon to chat about what is going on and process and pray.  At times it has been hard to find those spaces in the day, so we try and be intentional about connecting throughout the day.  When the boys were younger it was much harder to have a conversation without interruption so we had to go out and have a walk together in the afternoon to get some talk time.  It wasn’t something that came naturally, we had to be intentional about it. 

Talking with Jesus - it is not something that always happens naturally - I have to be intentional about it.  

My alarm in the morning wakes me up with a reminder to connect with Him; I have to allow myself to stop at snack time in the morning when the boys have run off to play and take a moment to reconnect with Him and ask Him what the focus of the next half of the morning should be.  I need to allow myself 10-15 minutes to lay on my bed after lunch with a worship song playing to rest in His Presence.  I have to stop reading on my phone for long enough in the half an hour before bed to read His Word and ask Him what His Spirit is saying to me right now.  

It doesn’t always happen naturally.  I have to be intentional.  I have to link times with Jesus to things I am already doing so that I remember to do them.  I have to set alarms.  I have to guard those times too because guaranteed, if they are planned in, there will be some distraction to try and stop them from happening. 

  And still it can be so easy to fall into guilt when I do let a time slip by, but I am trying to tell myself that God isn’t sitting there with a wagging finger ready to push me away.  He so patiently waits with open arms, ready to embrace me whenever I come running, just as I do with my children when they have been away playing and come back for a cuddle.  

This is part two in a short series on Righteousness: In Right Relationship.  If you missed last week's post, where I wrote about how being right can be wrong, you can read it here. 

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I recommended this last week, but it is so good every day that I want to recommend it again! If you want a great little book of daily devotionals focusing on a daily walking out of intimacy with Jesus, check out Sarah Young's 'Jesus Calling'.