Ezra

I was reading in Ezra this morning. In this book we are looking at the Israelite's return to Babylon -  during their time away, people had made some bad decisions. They had walked away from the will of God.

One bad decision had spiraled into many and affected crowds of people, whole families! Sound familiar? It's why I'm reading ;) As stepmoms, our lives are often dictated by the decisions of others. Many times, those decisions feel wrong.

Looking at the situation, Ezra was overcome. He was so distraught at the sin of the people and anger of God. He fell on his face weeping and praying.

Look at Ezra 10:4 - the people said "Get up, for it is your duty to tell us how to proceed in setting things straight. We are behind you, so be strong and take action." Verse 5 - "So Ezra stood up."

I have a quote in my Bible from Lori Wilhite, she has a study on Ezra called Rise Up. You can follow the clickable link or find her study on YouVersion. She writes "We can sometimes find ourselves on our backside.Maybe we made a bad decision. We might end up on our back ends because of someone else's poor decisions. Either way, we all have moments when we need to rise up. Take courage, rise up, choose faith."

Ex spouses, the court, lawyers....we all have these outside influences directing traffic in our lives. Sometimes the actions they take feel wrong, we get put in a position that is really hard to handle.

 What are you going to do about it? Sit and weep? Yes, there's a time for that. But then we need to look at the heroes of the faith. We need to Rise Up in our faith and carry on. There's more work to be done.