Foot Baths, Ear Candles, and Peace.

Blog post time! I’m honestly really excited to write this post because I’m in a really creative mood! And so with that, I’m just going to jump into the story!

Last night I was lying in bed and I was thinking, which is something I do quite a bit (haha), and I was thinking about a conversation I had with a dear friend of mine back in the middle of October. When I had that conversation, I had gotten back from a women’s retreat for SWAT a few hours earlier, and in the conversation, I said that I knew there were things that God still needed to fix within me. There are always things that God needs to fix within us because we are humans and we are imperfect. But after spending one-on-one time with God that weekend, I could see several areas that really, really needed work. That was all over a month and a half ago, and looking back from where I am at now, God has fixed and is continuing to fix those areas. God had to extract the bad out of me, and replace it with good. And I will honestly say that the extraction process has not been fun; it has definitely hurt at times, but the end result is so much better. And this concept last night made me think of this time that I had a spa certificate for several things and one of them was for this treatment that was footbath that was supposed to cleanse out impurities from your body through some special footbath machine. Somehow it extracts the bad out of your system through the pores in your feet. And then after thinking about that, and my speculation of if that even really works, it made me think about the ear candle craze from about 6 years ago. (Here is where we get to the main point haha and you are like WHAT?!) Around 6 years ago, I would guess, there was this craze on the whole ear candle thing and how they were supposed to draw all of the wax out of your ears and help you to hear better. My parents had found out about it from a friend of theirs (I don’t remember who) and I remember they had tried it and believed it. But then, they started to question the concept, and did a little investigation of their own by really looking at the candle and I think my dad may have cut one open. After that, they came to the conclusion that it really didn’t work. And as I was thinking about that, it made me think of how that concept could be applicable to real life. What I realized was that, the concept of believing, investigating, disproving was exactly the journey I went on to disprove Satan’s lies that I believed. At one point, I believed I wasn’t good enough for numerous reasons. I fully believed it. But then with God’s help (I could have NEVER done it on my own), I began to investigate those lies, and came to the conclusion that they were lies. I found the root of the weed and used a weed killer (called the Word of God) and then in the end, disproved the lies. I realized last night that this is a process that we need to continually go through in every area of our lives. Look at the things we believe and make sure that they are truly from God, otherwise we may find ourselves believing in something that is completely false and untrue. If I hadn’t gone through that year long process, I would still be in a boat of misery believing that I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t pretty enough, I wasn’t smart enough, I was incredibly flawed, etc. But in God I am good enough, and that’s all that matters. We need to continually go on the ear candle journey, but step 1 for all of us is that we MUST make God our number one priority. You may say, “But Morgan, I have made God my number one priority.” And you may be right, you may have, or you may be where I sat for so long, thinking that God was number one, but He wasn’t. I placed several things in from of Him, a big one being myself. You will know that God is your number one priority when you take your eyes off of God for a second, your whole world changes. I did that one Tuesday. Accidently, I took my eyes off of God, and I found myself in a boat of pain because the enemy saw that my defenses were down and that it was a perfect opportunity to attack. And the enemy knows us well; he knows what buttons to press and he knows what will inflict the most damage, and he did just that Tuesday night. He inflicted a lot of pain in ways that he knew would hurt me. And then Wednesday night, God got my attention and turned my eyes back to Him, and the second He did that, the pain went away and I could see again.

You will also know that God is your number one priority when He provides you with peace that can only be from Him. Back on that women’s retreat, the last morning during our last session time, everyone got a turn to be in the “Hotseat.” We didn’t really call it anything, but hopefully, that will help you to understand a little more. While a person was in the Hotseat, everyone asked God what they would have Him tell that person. The Holy Spirit came that morning and filled the room. A drenching downpour of the Holy Spirit came down. When it was my turn to be in the Hotseat (and if you know me well, I hate being the center of attention in that way), one sweet woman told me that God would bring me contentment and that would lead to peace and that would be a great journey for me. And I was like okay, that’s good stuff. I have all of the things people said written down in my journal, and I will occasionally read through them, and every time I would read that one, I saw that one as being a thing for the future. But I realized Thursday that the time is now. Without me realizing it, God has taken me on a journey to find contentment, which has lead to overwhelming peace, and it is all because I finally have placed Him truly as number one and placed my eyes on Him. I was writing a letter to someone Thursday night, and I said that I had suddenly received this overwhelming peace about the future. This is the end result of this particular extraction process. CONTENTMENT and PEACE.

So, I encourage you to go give the “ear candle” approach a try- look at what you have believed in all areas of your life and compare it to Jesus Christ and the Word of God, and also allow God to take you on a personal adventure to contentment and peace, but step one of that is to place your full focus on Him alone.