Great, Great, Great

And I mean that in the most sarcastic way possible. Really.

So remember back, when I was writing the Hosea book... you know, meth addict, lots of blowing stuff up, good times... God and I had a little discussion. Which consisted of, "You should study Hosea." Yeah, I know. Been there, read it, writing a book, thank you very much, have a nice day, and all that jazz. "No, you should STUDY Hosea." Which means what, exactly? A few days later, I'm peacefully sleeping, snuggled up with my man and my dog. Okay, just the dog. But anyway, God wakes me out of a sound sleep and says, "You should read some commentaries." Uh, okay, does He take me for a brainiac? Apparently. I do some minor commentary research and say, "When I get the money, I'll get a commentary."

Wouldn't you know, I ended up with an Amazon ecert from a dear friend. Of course, I did not connect the dots until one fine night when I really *WAS* snuggling with the man, and I was woken up with "Use your ecert to buy a commentary." Well, I was really irritated at being woken up, so I said, "I'll do it in the morning." And then I forgot. So THEN, friend who sent the ecert emails me a while later and says, "Hey, I see that you didn't spend it yet. Don't forget." I sent her a very nice email saying I'd do it that week, but because I was paranoid about forgetting again, I went ahead and ordered not one, but TWO commentaries, PLUS the Hosea book Francine Rivers wrote, PLUS a fun book for me. I got my fun book a while ago, but the Hosea books were taking forever.

They came today.

I start reading, despite the fact that I desperately need to do some laundry folding. And basically, all of this weird, totally random stuff that has been happening to me spiritually for YEARS started to click. Like mega click. Including the current series my beloved Joyce is teaching with some dude who wrote a book about the Ten Commandments and God has decided that I need to listen. Yes, all of this is great and fabulous and wonderful because I'm deepening my relationship with God.

But He's preparing me to do some really hard things and I don't like doing hard things. And yes, I know that in the end, it'll be really good for me, and it'll totally rock my universe and bring me soooo much closer to Him, and it'll be really awesome.

However, it's like climbing a mountain, which I seldom do, because it's a lot of work, and I'm terribly out of shape. But every now and again, I think, I can go on a hike up this little mountain. So I start to climb. And I get excited because hey, I'm climbing a mountain! It gets hard, though, and I get tired. But I keep climbing. And then, just as I think I'm at the top, I realize, huh, this is only a hill on the way up the mountain. Which, on one hand, is REALLY irritating, because I've already done all this work, and I'm not going to go home without climbing the mountain, so I HAVE to finish climbing the mountain. ICK ICK ICK. And so, after much whining, much work, and much exhaustion, I get to the top of the mountain.

And it is so freaking worth it.

Do me a favor and remind me of that as I'm climbing, because I think this is going to be the highest, biggest mountain that I've ever climbed, and that's a little bit scary. So glad that I own Joshua 1:9. HA! Take that, bad guys on the path.

Yep, starting to get loopy. Sleep deprivation is setting in. I'm trying to stay up until the podcast of my beloved Joyce is done, because I know a few folks who need to hear it, not to mention *I* need it, but iTunes is being horrifically slow tonight. Someone remind me to do it tomorrow.