Distance Team Bonding: My Favorite Quote

Tonight, our distance ladies will be doing some good old team bonding. I am glad, because our team has been less than unified, and I think this will be nice.

We were all asked to pick a favorite quote, write it on an index card and bring it with us. Romans 5:8, Lamentations 2:19, 2 Corinthians 5:21, Hosea 14:4, and a thousand others came to mind.

Not to mention,

God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him (Piper)

Life is brief and it is fleeting but it is not an emergency (Ann Voskamp)

Why do bad things happen to good people? It happened once, and He volunteered (RC Sproul)

All of these are good, but I have landed on a verse that has become an integral part of my life. It holds the power to calm every fear, doubt, anxiety, and negativity. It soothes my storms and snaps me back to reality every time - the reality that I am alive because Jesus lives, and that God is good, all the time. It keeps my mind and heart captive to Christ, and brings me perfect peace. It reminds me that,

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; 
Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. (Psalm 16:6)

It is a promise that I cling to when things don't appear pleasant - when the lines appear to be falling jumbled and crooked and helter-skelter. It lets me look at the uglies and say, my God says these are my pleasants, and my beautifuls. You may mean this for evil, but God means it for good.

It brings infinite reason to praise. In Christ I have inherited grace upon grace - salvation and life and best friends and snow days and cookie making and freedom and cuddles and joy and sunrises and peace and long runs and room-filling laughter. And love. So very much love.

I have these words tattooed on my soul, so that it has become a part of me when I'm

in class
on a run
at worship practice
on the pole vault runway
meeting with friends
between classes and meetings and practices
answering hard questions
in the early waking hours, searching for joy
on the bus
on my floor before the Lord
in the library
at the Johnsons'
in line at the mail center
at dinner with my noisy teammates
at an extra credit lecture
doing homework at my desk
earnestly seeking the beautiful

everywhere. everything.

A hundred or more times a day, I say, thank You, Lord. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed I have a beautiful inheritance.

Thank You