At the top of my site, you will see a verse for 2014, it is Romans 12:2. I landed on this verse in the first month of the year. I love spending the first 21 days of the year focused on prayer and cleansing both my physical body and my spirit of the little things that have crept in over the previous 12 months. Each year, I pray for a verse to be the anthem of that year. The last couple of years have been passages from Galatians, but this year it’s Romans. This verse–I have a feeling–will unfold like a flower blooming for the first time in spring. I am seemingly still stuck on the first half of the first sentence, “Do not conform to the patterns of this world…”

This part of a sentence could take up about ten blog posts, but I’ll try to keep it to the one. What does it mean to conform to this world. For me, this passage has me thinking of how the world handles things–things being problems, successes, and relationships. I believe being aware of how the world says to go about handling these things is key in not getting tripped up. The other obvious key would be to know what the word of God says about how to handle said things. Often times when I am facing a situation like tension in a relationship of some sort, I think of this verse. Then, I try to identify how the world says I should handle this. Lastly, I pursue the council of Godly people–either in my life or through a written resource or podcast–to determine how God wants it handled. It seems that I could just skip to the last step, but I feel that identifying the world’s methods to be important. If you are aware, you will be able to more quickly see others’ advice for you as worldly or not. It also gives me insight into my own knee-jerk reactions. As I am trying to be transformed by the renewing of my mind, I must be aware of what my mind wants to do in the first few seconds of an occurrence in order to move it into a reaction telling of the presence of God in my life/mind/heart.

Do not conform is not a simple command. It is a journey out of the world’s methods and into the delight of permeating every aspect of your life with the presence of the Almighty!