Love Where You Live By Shauna PilgreenSample

Day Six

A Stirring

Scripture: Esther 4:14

God loves to stir our hearts for what stirs His. I use the word stir because that’s what it feels like internally. He’s got that wooden spoon hitting the corners of your heart. 

Mary could tell us what the stirring felt like as she pondered the shepherds’ words in her heart. Elizabeth felt it in her belly. David felt it on those days spent under the shade tree as a shepherd after he had already been anointed as king but wasn’t quite living like one yet. Samuel kept getting up at night, certain his name was being called. Philip sensed the man in the chariot wanted to chat. God might not be the Name above all Names in your city, but His activity is all around. His stirring. His presence. 

Are you wondering if you’re supposed to act? When that stirring becomes an urging, pay attention. God’s just getting started with what He’s about to unleash. God doesn’t tell us everything. We’d freak out. Think about Esther. I guarantee when she was playing princess with her friends as a girl, she wasn’t thinking it would really come true. When she was orphaned then raised by her uncle, she probably wasn’t expecting she would one day help her entire Jewish family. Even when Esther did make it into the palace, she was only one of many beautiful women. Yet God used her to save her people.

The stirring in my childhood church felt like a racing heart and clammy hands clamped on the pew in front of me, prompting me to go to the altar to pray or make a public decision. The stirring in my “slightly grown-up heart” feels like a rope pull toward something greater than myself. Stirrings aren’t necessarily clarity but undeniably the Holy Spirit doing the work of the Father in us. 

We probably won’t understand God’s plan until it all unfolds. But we’re hearing the voice of God through the stirrings of our hearts. That prompting toward faith is Him. 

What is stirring in your heart right now about what God might be calling you to do? It might be a stirring to talk with someone, to set aside time of quiet each day, or to pursue a dream you’ve had for years.