Live Openly and Expansively

There's a verse in The Message translation of the Bible that pushes all of my buttons.  The Apostle Paul is speaking to the people of the Early Church.  Here's how it reads in The Message:

Dear, dear Corinthians [don't you just feel the love?] I can't tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open spacious life.  We didn't fence you in.  The smallness you feel comes from within you.  Your lives aren't small, but you're living them in a small way.  I'm speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection.  Open up your lives.  Live openly and expansively!"  (2 Corinthians 6:11-13, emphasis added by me)

Because I think that Paul, as a messenger of God, was urging people to be wide open to hearing and responding to God's ways, that becomes part of my take away from this passage.  Here is what I know I want to do more of in this next year:
  • Take time to consider scripture and listen to God
  • Write down in my journal what I sense God speaking
  • Be willing to act on what I sense God is saying and doing
  • Continue to invite God to work in my life, to show me how to live, how to think, how to break out of my own self-imposed limitations.  I know that without God's work in my life, I am constrained by my limiting thoughts and mindsets.  
I know this is pretty basic, but I also know that I don't want to get to the end of my life and see how small of a life I lived because I was closed off to God's Spirit at work in my life, or didn't take the time to really allow God to stir my heart and for me to respond.  My desire is to live as large and expansive of a life that I can and I know that I need God for that.

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