Where you are.

You start where you are. Stop looking for the future, stop looking for the great things you will accomplish twenty years from now. Stop looking at what it is in your life you have done and haven't done and what you should have done by now if your life is going to turn out exactly the way you planned it.
I sat in a sermon on this same topic over a month ago and it never really hit me until right now.
God has been revealing things to me in my life that I dream of doing in the future and the enemy has started to take hold of those things and turn my focus on them instead on living in the present. I am fairly certain I won't be at this school for longer than the fall semester but until tonight I couldn't stop focusing on not getting too attached because I would be leaving. Not getting too plugged in because I would not be able to see anything grow. And I actually started to believe that my being here was useless. I started to believe the lie.
A part of me began to wish I had never come here. How could I form caring relationships knowing I was just going to leave? How could I be a tool for God when I made the wrong decision and didn't follow His will in coming here?
But the amazingness of God is that He still uses me. He doesn't make me feel like a useless tool in the back of the shed because I messed up. He shows me that I messed up and uses me anyway. And it is such a blessing. I am close to tears typing this out because up until about 20 minutes ago, I believed the lies whispered to me that I was useless. But this morning I shared scripture with a friend on campus and just tried to lift him out of the funk he seemed to be in. He thanked me and we both went on with our days. It was earlier than 10am and I had just cut coffee out of my diet when this happened so by nightfall, I actually forgot our entire conversation. I was feeling a disconnect from the Lord and the lies I had been whispered were the cause of it. Then, a few minutes ago, I was reading outside of my dorm when my friend's girlfriend walked by. She told me how he had been so happy that I encouraged him this morning. It changed his mood. I laughed and told her I couldn't even remember what I had said. (All I really remember about our conversation was that I told him that if he needed my help to give me a bird call).
God used me to encourage him. And that is so encouraging. We start where we are. If you're willing, God is going to use you where ever you are. I may have made a mistake in coming here, but God is using it for His glory.   He used me today and that shows me I am loved more than anything else. That shows me that I can be used through my inadequacies. Praise God and thank you Lord Jesus.