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I’m excited to announce that A Woman’s Heart That Dances will officially be released in one week. First copies arriving here at our Quiet Time Ministries Training Center will be shipped immediately after the official release date. Our copies JUST arrived on Friday - woohoo!! I can’t even begin to say how excited I am about this special book. A Woman’s Heart That Dances is every woman’s story of her dance with her Lord. I talk about His overture and how He invites us to lean in to His embrace and dance. Then I talk about our response. And then, the amazing, incredible result when we follow His lead. Oh how lifechanging it is to dance with the Lord. Included in this book is my own personal story of the dance and also character sketches of women in the gospels who knew and loved Jesus. These women’s lives are shared in such a way as to allow you to enter personally into their life experience with Jesus. My prayer for all of us, after reading this book, is to answer the Lord’s invitation, and enter into the dance.

Another special feature of A Woman’s Heart That Dances is the cover of the book. I LOVE the cover of this book. It features the artwork of the one and only Kathleen Rousar, who is an amazing artist. You can see more of her work at www.klrousar.com. She is one of the great artists of our time IMHO. She has a whole series of Ballerina paintings and four are featured in black and white at the beginning of each of the four sections of A Woman’s Heart That Dances. A Woman’s Heart That Dances is one of those books that I am giving away to many women and teenage girls in my life just to encourage them either to begin their dance with the Lord or to embrace Him more and follow His lead in their lives. As Ecclesiastes 3:4 (NCV) says, There is…a time to dance. I believe NOW is that time. So, may we all gain a new encouragement in our relationship with the Lord as we lean in, follow His lead, and dance!

I came to my quiet time with the Lord today in anticipation that He was going to speak to my heart. I’ve been thinking through some things that have weighed upon my heart for some time now. The Lord has been faithful over the years to show me in His time what He is teaching me. And today He spoke in some key verses in The Daily Light, a devotional I love to live in day by day. The Daily Light is all scripture, organized according to various themes. As an aside, Lilias Trotter used The Daily Light every day in her quiet time. Amy Carmichael, Gladys Alyward, and Hudson Taylor also meditated daily in The Daily Light. Good company for us! Anyhow, today the scripture focused on the Lord’s presence, His leading, and the ways of the Lord. Lots of good verses from everywhere in the Bible. But Jeremiah 10:23 stood out to me: “I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps” (English Standard Version). I got to thinking about this verse and read it in a couple of other translations. The NLT says it this way: “I know, LORD, that our lives are not our own. We are not able to plan our own course.” The MSG reads this way: “I know, GOD, that mere mortals can’t run their own lives, that men and women don’t have what it takes to take charge of life.” Then, I cross-referenced Jeremiah 10:23 and found Proverbs 20:24, a VERY GOOD verse to remember: “Man’s steps are ordained by the LORD, how then can man understand his way?” (NASB). The NLT, “The LORD directs our steps, so why try to understand everything along the way?” Okay, so now I was GETTING what God was saying to me. He was putting His finger on my struggle. Proverbs 16:9 says, “We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.”

What the Lord brought home in my heart today is that I fall into the habit of trying to understand what He is doing. I found myself looking at things and saying “God must be doing this…God must be doing that…oh, this must be what God is going to do.” Have you ever fallen into that habit? When we do that, we are, in a sense, thinking we can manage or direct our steps, and figure everything out about life. But clearly, from the verses above, the Lord directs our steps and He is the only One who knows the way He is taking us. And what He was saying to me today is that He wants me to stop trying to understand and instead, trust Him. Leave the results to Him. I won’t understand what He is doing most of the time because His ways are higher than my ways (Isaiah 55:9). He says, “…my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine” (Isaiah 55:8 NLT). And of course, I have known these things, but today I KNOW them more. God brought these truths home to my heart in a new and deeper way.

And then, He brought Proverbs 3:5-6 to my mind - I turned to it: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.” How good is that! I need to just stop trying to “understand everything along the way” and, instead, TRUST - total reliance under stress and trial. Just trust and leave it all with God. Seek Him and do what He’s called me to do. So, what God is doing is refining my own priorities and affections and building in me a deeper trust in Him. So today, as I launch into the day, my focus is GOD and trusting in Him every step of the way. I may not know what the future holds, but I do, indeed, know WHO holds my future. And He is the One I can trust with my life and the lives of my loved ones. He is ENOUGH for whatever comes my way.
Lord, thank You today for showing me that I don’t need to understand everything along the way and instead, just need to trust You. Help me to fix my eyes on You today, seek Your will in all I do, and trust You to show me what path to take. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Today I read Mark 1:9-20 in my quiet time. I’m constantly amazed at how my Bible reading corresponds with Oswald Chambers in My Utmost For His Highest. Today the Lord is focusing me on discipleship and following Him. We see in Mark 1:17 that Jesus said to Simon and Andrew, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” How did they respond to His call? “Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.” You can’t help but see that word “immediately.” Right now. Not later, or after I finish what I want to do, but immediately. Oswald Chambers says, “Discipleship means personal, passionate devotion to a Person, our Lord Jesus Christ. There is a difference between devotion to a Person and devotion to principles or to a cause. Our Lord never proclaimed a cause; He proclaimed personal devotion to Himself. To be a disciple is to be a devoted love-slave of the Lord Jesus.” I don’t know about you, but those words light a fire in my heart! That’s my desire - personal, passionate devotion to Christ. Plain and simple. I want my spiritual hearing to be so tuned to His voice that when He says go, I go; when He says give, I give; when He says stop, I stop. Oh Lord, work this out in me through Your Spirit.

And then, OC talked about the work of the Spirit in making us Christ’s disciples. He wrote, “The only Lover of the Lord Jesus is the Holy Ghost, and He sheds abroad the very love of God in our hearts (Romans 5:5). Whenever the Holy Ghost sees a chance of glorifying Jesus, He will take your heart, your nerves, your whole personality, and simply make you blaze and glow with devotion to Jesus Christ.” I think we need to remember our dependence on the Lord for everything. He does in us, through the Spirit, what we can never do in and of ourselves. Commitment must be God-wrought in us, not mustered up in the flesh. And that is the beauty and magnificence of following Christ. He makes us brand new - not an alteration of the old, but a metamorphosis. We are “His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). I have been thinking deeply about these things for many years and the Lord is working them into my own life. And sharing it is just a taste of what I’ve written in a new book I’ve just completed, A Woman’s Walk In Grace - God’s Pathway To Spiritual Growth. Oh that we would, as OC says, blaze and glow with devotion to Christ.
Lord, thank You for calling me to be Your disciple. Do in me what I can never do for myself. Fill me with a passionate devotion to You, and cause your light to shine in me, drawing all to Yourself. In Jesus’ name, Amen.