“I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene.”  This is what comes to mind when I think of God my Father this morning.  Truly HE is The Amazing God.  Yesterday started with God’s direction to trust and obey.  As yesterday moved into late afternoon I got a phone call from one of our CR guys I sponsor.  He was very troubled about some items that were making him most angry.  This is one of the two things that brought him to Celebrate Recovery–anger.  He needed to vent and find direction.  When I asked him what he wanted people to see from his anger, he said he wanted them to see his point.  I asked what people did see when he got angry?  He said–my anger.  At that point we were able to talk through an approach he could and would take.  He was able to surrender the anger to God and trust that God would use His Ways so that “his point” would be heard rather than his angry voice.  About 30 minutes after this call another one came.  This one lasted almost 2 hours.  I don’t sponsor this one, but he does call or come by now and then as I had been his step study leader a year ago.  He too eventually got to the point of seeing his anger and his selfishness as his stumbling blocks.  This man is young and shy, but he is also bright and prideful.  It was amazing to hear God’s message for me yesterday morning–trust and obey–being said from my mouth to a couple others needing to hear and process it.  In both cases, they felt righteous about their situations but no one was seeing their righteousness.  When they took a step back and looked at what they wanted the outcome to be, they could see the stumbling block–themselves.

God’s ways are surely not our ways.  Humanness is so selfish and ugly when it rears its head.  We all know this from personal experience.  Surrendering so we can trust is a paradox to man–yet God’s ways are often a paradox to man’s ways.  It is the difference between Spirit and humanness.  We trust God’s Spirit, but to do so needs us to surrender our human desire to control and have our way.

Tonight’s meeting will need me doing this several times today.  I do have an agenda for the meeting that could easily look just like me.  I know the meeting is to happen and I know what God wants from it, I have surrendered myself already this morning and I will do so each time I begin to sense that moment of willfulness or anxiousness.  Neither of them are signs of trusting.  I want to trust and obey.