What is Gods Will? And How Will I Know His Will From My Own?

I have been doing a lot of "soul searching" this past year or two. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we have been trying to pay off all of our debt and that comes with sacrifices that many would never fathom. I mean how many times a week can one family eat beans and rice without the house exploding? :-)  How long will we have to live in this trailer that really could double as a nice duck blind? Get my drift??? I mean, sacrificing and doing without is not anybodies idea of a good time. There have been times when I would've love to seen Dave Ramsey (author of Financial Peace University) drawn and quartered. (Sorry, Mr. Ramsey but I bet I'm not the first to think something like that since this debt free stuff isn't for the faint of heart.)  There have been many days that what I wanted was to throw out the idea of a debt free lifestyle, go get a credit card, and go hog wild buying everything that I thought that we needed. Then I would come back to reality and realize that if I did that, then we would have to pay bills for the next bazillion years.  We are on the precipice of debt free living. We can reach out and touch it. Our passenger van is paid off now. WOOOHOOO!!!! It felt great to hold that title in our hands and know that our hard work and sacrifice had paid off, literally! So yes it has been worth it and I look forward to the post where I can write that we are truly, completely debt free.

Back to my original thought. (Sorry, just ask my husband, I am prone to straying off on a tangent or twelve.) Some of my soul searching has been from dealing with past issues in my life that I needed to deal with and let go of. A lot of it has led me down a dark path that I didn't want to go down, but I know now that I needed to go down that path to teach me some very important life lessons that I can hopefully pass on to my children. I only hope and pray that they can learn it early on from me and not have to take as long as I did to make the same amount of progress. 

So the title of my post today asked a couple of very important questions:  What is Gods will and how will I know His will from my own?  I still don't know the answer to this since I am still studying and I don't know that I will ever truly know Gods will from my own every time I am faced with a decision or a desire. But I am trying and I do think that counts. The first thing I did to find out Gods will was to open my Bible and a concordance. I have the Strong's Exhaustive Concordance and it is easy to get sidetracked but I feel that anytime that you are studying the Bible and your eyes are drawn to something different than you were searching for that it is probably something that God is trying to draw your attention to. My eyes were searching through the concordance for Gods will when my eyes landed on the word WOMAN. The index defined woman as the female sex and then it gave all the references in the bible that applied. I started skimming over the descriptions and found this. Woman- described as: beautiful, wise, widow, evil, foolish, gracious, virtuous, contentious, adulterous, honorable, silly, and holy. These words made me wonder, so I looked up the scriptures that were posted next to each word. I began to read descriptions of good women and bad women and I began to question which of those women that I could compare too. Don't ever do this unless you want to step on your own toes. And that is not very easy to do since as human beings we usually find ourselves blameless of pretty much everything. 

In the next column it said, Work of. The first thing listed was kneading meal (Gen. 18:6) which of course is the making of the bread. I don't think that every woman has to literally make bread in order to be following Gods will but I do think that it shows that women are basically the cooks of the home. I know that men CAN cook and some even enjoy it and I am not arguing that point. My point is that women have always been the ones that gravitate towards meal preparation.  Next listed was drawing water (Gen. 24:11, 13, 15) which looks at how Isaac met his wife Rebekah. She drew water for him to drink when he showed up. The women were always the one at the well getting water for things so this is listed as another duty of the woman of the house. This is also how Rachel met Jacob.  Next was tending sheep (Gen. 29:6). Now I know that most women don't have livestock to take care of although a few of us do. :-) Since sheep were a source of food, milk, clothing, and income for the family back in those days, it stands to reason that the woman of the house had a vested interest in making sure that they were tended to well. Making cloth (Prov. 31:13, 19) was on the list as well. Now the modern day woman tends to make cloth (i.e. provide clothing/blankets) by going to a store and buying these things. Some women still make clothes but not the majority. The point is that she provides the clothing and linens for her home and hopefully does it smartly. The last duty that was listed but in my opinion is the biggest duty of all was caring for the household (Prov. 31:27, 1Tim :14) simply put, she guides her home and takes care of all the needs of the home. 

Remember how at the beginning of this post I said that I was looking for Gods will. I think that he led me to it. If we live the way that he has said for us to then His will can be seen and felt. I think that it is when we step outside of what God has given us as priorities, that is when His will becomes cloudy.  I want to talk more about this but I also have other things on my mind that I need to spend time on so I will conclude here and continue this sometime soon. 

God Bless you all!