Learning to be smaller

Wow, what a day! It started at five forty five this morning and has really been non stop all the way til now. We took my nephews and niece back to Tennessee today, and it was a great adventure. We left around 6:00 this morning and drove through all the unexpected snow and mountains. The kids were great though, they slept most of the trip and that made it such a good ride. I tried to catch some sleep but it never really happened. We drove dropped them off and headed back. We stopped by the Biltmore mall on the way back home and had a chickfila milkshake and checked a Walden books that was going out of business. I bought a devotional by Eugene Patterson, who wrote the message, and it seems to be really good. I am always looking for a new challenging devotional and this one seems to be really good. I did two days of it today so I could be caught up on the new year for the book. It was a pretty long drive back so I called a friend and we caught up on how each other were doing and our plans and such. She made me a little jealous when she told me she was snowed in, I mean can I get any snow where I live? I don't even have to have a foot just give me some ha.
But as far as my quiet time tonight, God was definitely showing me that I need to realize that I am nothing with out him. Jeremiah was still all about how Jerusalem and Judah had made God mad because they were not doing what he wanted them to be doing, and because they were serving themselves and false gods. He was going to punish them by making them captives of a foreign country and not hear their prayers until he was ready to glorify himself and bring them out of captivity again. It makes me think, how often do we find ourselves treating God as just a genie in which we ask for things for but we choose to do things our own way verses following his way. In the end God does get all the glory but why not allow him to have all the glory right now? Just a thought. After Jeremiah I moved onto Matthew and got to read more about Jesus and how to be a better Christian. Something I have been challenging all the youth I spend time with lately is how are they going to be more like Christ? They have to examine his life, what he did, what he said, and why. I find that since I have started implying this into my study I feel like I have grown closer with him.
Tonight Jesus fed the 4000 men (as well as the women and children). I find it very interesting that Jesus while only having seven loaves of bread and two small fish found it a necessity to feed his followers. Jesus was not only concerned about the spirituality side of things, he was concerned with the physical side as well. Jesus shows us an perfect example here of how to evangelize to people, you must take care of their physical need before attempting to do anything else. If he hadn't done this a lot of these followers probably would have collapsed and found it hard to get home. Jesus doesn't stop at just the spiritual life and neither should we. We must love people to Jesus, the older I get the more I see that to be true. I am so very happy that Jesus cares about the small things in my life as well.
Verse of the Day- Jeremiah 16:19-21
O LORD, my strength and my fortress,
my refuge in time of distress,
to you the nations will come
from the ends of the earth and say,
"Our fathers possessed nothing but false gods,
worthless idols that did them no good.

Do men make their own gods?
Yes, but they are not gods!"

Therefore I will teach them—
this time I will teach them
my power and might.
Then they will know
that my name is the LORD.