Fruit of the Spirit

I have had the great privilege for a year and a half now to be part of a women's Bible study at my church called Titus2Women.  The word study does not even do this justice.  It is more than a study.  It is a group of women who are truly striving to know Jesus and His Word, deeply care about one another, and desire to honor God in their roles as His daughters, as wives, and as moms.  I can't even begin to explain how much I look forward to Tuesday morning each week, how much each of these women mean to me, and how much God has taught me and continues to teach me.
Starting in January, I have had the pleasure and honor of co-leading this class with my closest friend, Erin.  Our former leader is heading to Zambia for full-time ministry with her family as soon as they get their support raised.  She really needed to focus on that so she stepped down from her leadership role...(now, little did I know when I was asked to consider co-leaading this group that I also would be heading to Zambia-so I also will be stepping down for a year.)  It didn't take me long to say yes when I was asked.  Not because I thought I could do it, but I just felt like God was telling me to do it and He would see me through.  He knows I have a great passion for this group of women and for studying His word-and this is all I needed.  He is going to be the one who works in hearts anyways.
For the last year in Titus, we were studying the Women of the Bible-the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.  Heidi did a FANTASTIC job of breaking down who all these women were and how we could learn from them.  I was kind of nervous thinking about what we were going to study next.  My greatest desire was to keep us in the Word and to make it applicable to our daily lives.  The first day I started praying about it, a friend of mine mentioned that her favorite Bible verse is Galations 5:22-23.  These verses contains the 9 attributes of the Fruit of the Spirit.  She spouted them off and it just hit me...wow...it would be great to live by those.  Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  I don't know about you, but these are the characteristics I want to have.  Not just want to have, but need to have!  In order to be the wife and mom God wants me to be, these characteristics are pretty important.  I just knew our Titus group needed to look into these attributes and ask God to show us how to be these things.  The teacher in me pushed me to put together a study outline.  It was much more difficult to put together than a a typical lesson plan I would do for my 5th graders, but I just kept it simple and I just pray it is effective!  The next step was to give this idea to the team.  Thankfully, when we met as a Titus leadership group, it was a go...and hence, the Fruit of the Spirit Bible study was born.
Erin and I split up the topics and got to work.  She had the brilliant idea of starting off our study with looking at the Holy Spirit.  So glad she thought of this! This was crucial in understanding how we can even have the Fruit of the Spirit.  By now, we have covered the Holy Spirit, Love, Joy, and Peace.
Anyways, the whole reason I am telling you all about this is this: I am going to post the lessons to the blog.  God has been prompting me to do this and I just wasn't sure.  But I do now that God is working on my heart big time with this study and I don't want to keep it locked up to our small group of women.  So, be looking for posts on the Fruit of the Spirit and I hope you will consider studying them along with  us.  If you have any questions or thoughts, please shoot me an email!  And special thanks to Erin for tackling this along with me-I love how you have taken it and ran with it and you just let God speak to you and through you...