What the Book of Genesis Taught Me

Here is what the Book of Genesis taught me about who God is:
-Old
-Forgiving
-Persistent
-Repetitive
-Wants us to hear His message
-Powerful
-Educating me
-Good
-Blesses us when we listen to Him, because He needs us for His plan
-Conditioning me
-Sharing things with us through visions & dreams
-Odd sometimes
-True to His word
-Has no limits of time or the weakness of the flesh
-Is willing to negotiate
-Firm about what is best
-Urging us to go in the right direction
-Interesting
-Fierce in His testing
-Faithful...especially to those faithful to Him
-A lover of all kinds of people
-Giving
-Listening
-With everyone
-Sees how we treat each other
-Walking before us & conditioning & working in those He needs to, to carry out His plan & protect us
-Full of blessings
-Has a long-term plan & that plan needs generations of people to fulfill it
-Faithful to us when we hold true to His truths & do what is right when it is hard to
-Revealing things to us in our dreams via numbers, frequency of things that happen to us, according to periods of time
-Working on me
-ALWAYS thinking about us, regardless of what season we are in
-SO complex
-Tiring sometimes
-Faithful
-Administers blessings through others

God is taking me on a cover-to-cover journey through The Bible. I'm in the Book of Exodus now, but felt prompted to share what the Book of Genesis has taught me, BECAUSE the Book of Exodus is starting to show me another layer of who God is.

If I reflect back on my biggest take-aways from the Book of Genesis this is what I recall:

-I believe Jesus created the world & he had conversations with God & The Holy Spirit while He was creating it. He had their help as well.

-I saw human weakness amplified. I identified with these people; with their limited understanding; with their fear; with their quick ability to forget. God was with them, blessing them.

-I was reminded that customs we experience are not the same customs throughout the world & God loves everyone throughout the world.

-I was reminded that God has NO LIMITS of the flesh or of time and, although I don't understand how He does it, He navigates through the weak customs & structures of our world to draw us to Him & fulfill His plan.

-Even those God blessed abundantly lied. They lied lies that could GREATLY harm other people. God's grace was there with the people that could have been harmed & the people that could have caused harm. What I recognized were the motives of those lies.... Abraham did not lie about Sarah being his wife to harm Abimelech & his people. He lied to save Sarah, himself & move forward in carrying out God's plan. Isaac did the same with Rebekah. Both of those situations were brought to light.

-Motives of your actions are important. Above is a good example. Another is when Noah became angry with his son Ham. I felt like Noah had overreacted about Ham sharing with his brothers that their father fell asleep exposed after drinking too much. Then after meditating on it....He was upset with him because Ham's heart went to shame him & not help him. His other two brothers walked in backwards to cover Noah.

-God's people will experience hardship & He will walk through those  hardships with us.....as well as the joys.

-There is A LOT more that happened that The Good Book does not hold. If God needs us to know it, He will show us where to find it.

-The more you allow God to work in your life, the more your faith will grow.

-Families & leaders back then were just as flawed as we are. They wrestle with the same struggles & weaknesses, just in different situations. None of this is new to God. He has been navigating us through it for generation upon generation upon generation.

-No matter how monotonous reading name after name after name of people that were not major characters in The Bible can be....these people are our people. It gives a different sense of importance when you realize that.

-God became disappointed in His creation on multiple occasions.

Sometimes We Just Can't

There are times in life where we just can't...

We can't measure up to EVERYTHING our children need.
We can't measure up to what some people think we should be.
We can't manage our home or our work  like we'd like to.
We can't KNOW with any clear cut certainty what is the "right" choice sometimes.

I was reading Exodus 1:1-2:25. The piece within this reading that really spoke to me was about the birth of Moses. At the time of Moses's birth the king of Egypt had ordered that all Israelite boys that were born were to be thrown into the Nile River. Moses's mother raised Moses & hid him for 3 months & then coated a basket with tar & pitch & placed him in the reeds by the Nile.

Moses's sister watched her baby brother from afar... Can you imagine? Can you imagine your older child seeing her baby brother crying in the reeds, being left alone, abandoned by the mother...her mother that cared for them both. Can you imagine the MOURNING Moses's mother & sister MUST have been experiencing? Can you imagine them trying to make the "right" choices?

Then Miriam (Moses's sister) witnessed God's grace....his love... Pharoh's, (the king of Egypt) daughter saw the basket and felt sorry for him. Miriam was there & asked if she should get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby & Pharoh's daughter said YES! She went and got her mother & by God's grace Moses would live! As he got older his mother brought him to Pharoh's daughter for him to be her son. Again...I can not imagine the grief that Moses's family must have been feeling, but I can believe they were GRACIOUS beyond belief.

Where we can't, God can & will. He is moving without us knowing. He is guiding us where He needs us to be, He is revealing solutions to problems we don't even know we have & for problems that seem to have no "right" answer. He is SO abundant. He is SO...right there in it...with us!

I know that I felt VERY grateful for gaining this lesson this week. I am grateful for God's reminder of His power & His love for us. I am grateful that I could find it right there in my Bible...like it was waiting on me to read it.

There are places we just can't. It's not that we don't try. We TRY with EVERYTHING we have. Sometimes we just can't. We can't because we are not equipped. We can't because our knowledge & foresight is limited. We can't because God needs us to depend on Him. He rewards us for our courage & He rewards us for our faith.