This morning I was awakened to the door bell ringing a little before 6:00 am.  I would typically be getting up about now but not to answering the front door.  I quickly grabbed my bathrobe from the closet and answered it.  There stood one of our Celebrate Recovery guys.  He had had a troubling night and needed to talk about it.  As he talked about his struggle, I was reflecting on my own life.  There is no one, no not one, who doesn’t fall short of the glory of God.  All of us want to “make it up” to God somehow.  Instead, God simply wants us to accept His free gift.  This fellow had done this but he’d lost his way momentarily and needed to refocus.  We talked about how to bring his life into balance feeding his spiritual needs, physical needs and his mental/emotional ones.  He hadn’t been coming to Celebrate Recovery in a while and I hope now to see him back this coming week.

Have you ever wanted God to take away your will so you’d not have the ability to choose the wrong?  This is something my CR guest kept saying.  I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’d asked this of God over the years.  Now I was sharing with this young man that God won’t break His promise for him just as He wouldn’t break it for me.  God doesn’t remove choice so that we always have the chance to choose Him and His ways over our own selfish ones.  We simply have to find the help to choose His ways consistently.  This sounds so easy when I type it here.  Yet, when I reflect on life, oh so recently, I know how perplexing it can be when human desires and evil lies hit us.  This is why we need one another.  The journey to freedom brings us into fellowship with one another where we find genuine support and accountability for our hurts, hang-ups and habits.  This completes the verse  James 5:16 where we are told to confess to God, ourselves and to someone we trust.  The reason we do this is because the prayers of a righteous man are powerful and effective.  When we are in need, we are the one confessing.  However, the day will come when our faithfulness to this process will lead others to include us with their confessing.  It is when we begin to realize that we have become one of the ones whose prayers are powerful and effective for someone else.  God has used our past to bring glory to Himself and to another who is presently hurting.  God is truly amazing!