"Experienced" - Too

 "When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years." (Hebrews 3:9 KJV)

  "Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God's presence. So please don't lose heart because of my trials here. I am suffering for you, so you should feel honored. When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God's love and keep you strong. And my you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God." (Ephesians 3:12-19 NLT)

 Please try and hear me out, as I try myself to make this understandable, it still might not compute to all that listen, without some sort of experience in the same arena; we all have separate journeys, some more difficult than others, but we all have the same love that carries us to the very end! 

 Paul was incarcerated in prison, yet he was not actually in chains and without freedom; even if he actually was locked down and bound in chains! That might not sound logical to some, but when we have God's blessing and we have purpose, we are given freedom beyond what most people can comprehend. It is really just a matter of what God's doing in our lives; the more we make ourselves available for Him to work through us, the more we experience His great love; and no matter what our situation is, we are just fine with where God has us, even if it is being locked up in prison.

 I know that I have shared this before, but it is something I feel needs to be shared again. When I was in jail, after getting saved and starting to fellowship with other believers, I began to feel as though God had me where I was for a purpose. The more I shared with others about Jesus, the more I felt free and really didn't feel as though I was incarcerated. 

 When I was taken to the main County Jail for my first early-release hearing, I came into the room, where I saw my wife and my boss seated there to stand up from my release. No sooner than when I took a seat, and the woman in the middle of the panel call out my name, saying, "Mr. Norrup, release denied!" To which I instantly proclaimed, "Praise the Lord!" 

 If you could have seen the faces of my wife and boss when I said that. They looked at each other as if I didn't really want to come home. That night I spoke to my wife, and she asked me if I didn't want to come home, But I assured her that I really did, but at the same time, I felt God still had something for me to do. 

 With that, coming to this current situation, being the condition of my wife. I feel as though this is a lot like being incarcerated; except it is more regarding my wife's situation more than myself. That said, we are one! So we are pretty much both incarcerated in the same situation; except hers is more restrictive and hardest to understand. 

 I love my wife with all my heart, and I hate to see her in this condition; it causes me to breakdown from time to time, begging God to heal her or take her home; yet He keeps showing me that He is still at work, in some way of another...

"But thank God! He has made us his captives and continues to lead us along in Christ's triumphal procession. Now he uses us to spread the knowledge of Christ everywhere, like a sweet perfume. Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance rising up to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently to those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume. And who is adequate for such a task as this?" (2 Corinthians 2:14-16 NLT)