A New Year: Pebble or Shale? (Part 2)

God’s love for you is there and it’s here and it’s all around you. It’s as delicate as the silken touch of a rose petal, yet with a more delicate scent. It’s as real as the very heartbeat you feel within you, if you focus long enough to feel it. The beauty of His love for you surpasses the enveloping mist that wraps around the peak of a mountain after a storm. And His love for you has more power, more determined ferocity than any storm on this earth to protect you from harm. Yet it is nothing you can count, nothing you can add up and take away from to make it add up or make sense. It will never add up here. Jesus loves you regardless of what you’ve done simply because it’s the truth and the truth is His character. You don’t need to comprehend it all; all He asks is you believe and seek His forgiveness and open your heart, your life to Him. He surrendered His own for you. When His body hung heavily on that cross, perhaps His heart felt lifted as He imagined your face and the day you would first ask for Him while kneeling at an altar, sitting in a crowded restaurant, crying under a tree. Perhaps He heard the sweet melody, the humble vibrations of your voice, knowing the very day and hour you would accept Him into your life. Perhaps it lessened His pain knowing and seeing what may be.

And yet you still have that choice. God created you because He wants to love you, not control you. Can you imagine that? The Creator of every planet in our universe, who formed the sun with His own mighty hands, is still tender enough to craft the gossamer wings of a butterfly and compassionate enough to give you the option of choosing Him, of choosing the Creator’s design for your life. So what do you choose? Do you choose to be a gray pebble, smoothed over, won over by the world, or do you choose to be the shale within God’s hand that He uses? The shale, with all the layers you allow God to break away, not so He may see who you are, but so you may see who He created in you. And when He gets you down to the core of your purpose, the reason HE created you, trusting wherever He chooses to use you, following when things don’t make any sense, going where He calls even when you are terrified, taking those steps forward when you know He is the only One who could possible hold you up, knowing and believing He will never let you sink; HE will reach into the water to save you every time. It is in that moment God can now use you for His purpose, forming ripples upon this ocean of a world, reaching out to as many as possible, to save others from sinking below the surface and from being consumed by the darkness. If you choose to be used by the Mighty Hand that created you.

-Joey Rudder

Joey Rudder

Joey lives in Sherrodsville, Ohio with her husband, Jim, and their eight-year-old daughter, Danika. She has the honor and privilege of being a local pastor for a church in Dellroy and spends time visiting, encouraging, and talking with those God places on her path. And since she was eight-years-old learning to type on an old Royal typewriter, God has filled Joey with a passion for writing. She is just so excited to see God’s beautiful plan for her life unfold in so many wonderful ways to bring Him honor and glory.