Failure to rest our minds and keep working puts us in a place of sin and weakness. There are three legs of a balanced stool...worship, work, and wellbeing. These three work together to support one another. As work increases, worship and wellbeing must increase.

What happens when you choose God, and things still go left?! There is so much happening in our worlds, and so easy to get sidetracked and out of whack. Does that mean God throws us away? Or does His hand remain on us? Does He continue shaping and molding us all the more in His image?

It's about to go down, but where are you? Does the sun not rise in the morning if we didn't see it? God is constantly performing miracles, the question is are we in the right place at the right time to experience it or receive it ourselves!

Sometimes God will withhold something from us. And sometimes we don't understand until later in life. However, there are moments in life when we desire something badly, just like Hannah. When our motives are right, and we decide to give back to God the very thing we've requested of Him, He blesses us with so much more!!

As we walk this journey in our Christian faith it is imperative that we always hold on to our fear of God. Not fear in a sense that we are afraid, but fear in a sense of respect. This respect for God will govern how we carry ourselves and engage with others. This is a true start to our maturity in the Kingdom of God.

Most of us have spent our lives looking for fruit to eat as opposed to becoming a tree of life. This perspective creates people who are short sighted, self centered and self absorbed. Like the woman in our story, trauma is often required to shock us out of our limitations and into the miraculous. In the midst of her need she was asked a question that would shift her paradigm and change every area of her life FOREVER!

Each gate in Jerusalem had a specific function and use. The natural gates of the city of Jerusalem still have symbolic or metaphoric meaning in our lives today. Life has done it's best to knock us down, but having the right people in our lives (at our gates/feeding into our lives during specific moments) make all the difference in how we come out of things on the other side. They help us to get things flowing in the right direction and keep thing out that shouldn't come in.

If God's hand is on your life, take a moment to reflect on that in gratitude. God's arm is never to short and He always blesses His children. Even when we walk through painful moments in our lives, He can take that and cause it to bless us and those around us. He blesses us in many ways, check this podcast out to learn how!

The gates in Jerusalem have been destroyed by fire. These gates determine the flow in and out of the city. Water, fish, sheep and even sewage. They also determine how the community of people in the city thrive. In order to destroy the city you must stop all the natural flow...valley, dung, fountain, water, horse, east, inspection.

The Israelites are a relatively young nation and there is a reason why! Because of their refusal to enter the land of promise some forty years prior, God let the adults die in the wilderness. Poetic biblical justice can be heard in the verse in Numbers. Where God let's the people know because of their disbelief, in God granting them victory in the promised land, no one in their generation will step one foot into the promise!