Even When You’re Like a Tornado

Editor’s Note: It’s Sit & Listen Saturday at Devotionals Daily. Enjoy reading as well as listening to this devotion from Always Enough, Never Too Much by Hayley Morgan and Jess Connolly – a unique flip-book devotional perfect to encourage all women! Listen on the blog below or on your Alexa device by enabling the skill and then prompting, “Alexa, ask devotionals to read today’s devotion.”

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. — Galatians 5:22-23 ESV

The other day a friend told me my life looks like a whirlwind. Her comment smarted for a few minutes, a little like a smack on the hand. I think it stung because it wasn’t how I hoped I came across to people — and also because it was true.

I desperately want to be serene and peaceful, like a white-noise sort of calm in people’s lives. I want people to leave my presence feeling that calm. Instead, I sometimes feel like I’m more of a storm.

When I think about this part of myself, I go in fits and spurts of acceptance and denial. I wonder if it’s a problem or just how God created me. I feel unkempt, but also creative and courageous. I take bold risks, but I also fail at some of the niceties of being a Christian woman.

Also, I have four boys — and that would cause any woman to leave a tornado in her wake.

As for the question of whether my whirlwind life is a problem or the plan, I’ve found that the answer is complicated. Here’s how I’ve tried to work it out.

In the grand scheme of things, I think God made me this way. He made me with intense ideas, with a high risk tolerance, with a dogged persistence to do what I think is right. But all of these things should be tempered by the fruit of the Spirit as I mature in Christ.

My whirlwind should be marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

That is a tall order! Am I willing to let God shape and move my energy into a force for good and love? Am I willing to wait for God’s timing, even when everything in me wants to go? Am I willing to quiet my storm to let someone else shine? Am I able to hold myself back when I need to?

These are important questions to ask anytime you want to temper the ways you were made. The way God made you is good, and the way God continues to mold and change you is good too. If you forsake how God formed you before you were born into this world, you’ll be missing out on a foundational part of your birthright from God. And if you resist the way He’s moving in your life now, you’ll be missing out on the kind of work He’s done through all of history.

Making people more like Jesus is the work of God, and people like Peter, Paul, Mary, and Martha were the recipients of His tempering. They allowed Him to use their raw potential and to shape it into something even more lovely for His glory. Let’s be willing to do that too. He will make us more like Christ, and our individual quirks and passions will reveal a unique part of God’s goodness to the rest of the world.

~Hayley

Excerpted with permission from Always Enough Never Too Much by Jess Connolly and Hayley Morgan, copyright Jessica Ashleigh Connolly and Hayley E. Morgan.

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Your Turn

“The way God made you is good, and the way God continues to mold and change you is good too.” Today, let’s not cringe at the way He made us, but let’s also lean into the ways that He is molding us! Come share your thoughts with us on our blog. We want to hear from you! ~ Devotionals Daily