Stacie:
During the last few weeks of the semester, I had been thinking about doing a Bible study with some people from home. I was learning all of these things, getting excited about what God was teaching us, and Rhett and I were both looking forward to sharing these things with my friends from high school. My reasoning was, that if I had gone through high school never learning some of these cool truths, then OBVIOUSLY these things would be mysteries to my friends as well. I really wanted to talk with them, find out where they were at, and tell them what we had learned. I didn’t realize how much God would teach me through this experience, and we’ve only met together a couple times!
The first thing that struck me right away was how much my friends had grown in Christ since high school, even (gasp!) apart from Bible classes every day. It was so encouraging to see that God has His own ways, and that His ways can be completely different from person to person. We’ve had some great discussions so far, and I’m looking forward to the ones to come. We’ve been going through Romans (so much amazing stuff to cover in such a short summer!!), and I am just loving the things God’s been showing me. We were hoping to make it through the whole book by the end of the summer, but at this point I’ve pretty much given up hope of that happening- we would rather just focus and dig deep on fewer passages than try to cover so much material that we don’t get much out of it (although there is still quite a bit of skimming involved!). It just amazes me how much God can teach me from a book I’ve studied before- that Bible of His is limitless!!
Another thing that God encouraged me with was allowing me to see my own growth as well. There was growth in knowledge, I suppose, but that wasn’t as cool to see as the growth in maturity. In high school, though my relationship with God was not much to speak of, I was still very outspoken when it came to my views on doctrine. To me, winning a debate was often more important than maintaining unity with my siblings in Christ. The cool thing about this study is that there are people from multiple different denominations, with different opinions and ideas, and we just have great discussions! We rejoice in Christ and in the important stuff, and we don’t let the little things cause us to be upset with each other. It has also been wonderful to have truly spiritual conversations with people that I’ve never really done so with in the past. God has really been blessing and encouraging me through these dear friends of mind, and I just thank Him for putting them in my life!
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