The message God gave me yesterday regarding gratitude is continuing/lingering.  After writing the blog entry yesterday I went into our bedroom to talk with my wife Kathy.  I thought rather than try to tell her what happened I’d simply read her the entry from my phone.  Little did I know the emotional release it would cause.  It was like a dam broke loose–one that wasn’t ever suppose to be built.  I wept in her arms.  I was able to share most of this with my accountability group last night at Celebrate Recovery.  This seems really intimate to me.  I think praise must have a direct link to the gratitude capacity God built in us originally.  Now that the dam has been broken, I hope to be able to trust intimacy more.  I’m going to need to linger in this territory for a while longer.  There is something about pride built into this area I need to ponder and uncover with God’s help.  I want my pride to be an inner, emotional energy used to God’s glory and not to be used as a protective device.  This too needs some time working it through for better clarity.

Tonight we have our Celebrate Recovery’s leadership meeting to organize our moving into the new year–kickoff happens on September 21st.  I attend a lot of meetings and even organize many of them, but I have a tremendous sense of joy building about tonight’s time.  There seems to be a level of commitment from others (new ones) being expressed.  I’m looking forward to watching God work tonight as we walk through new areas of ministry within CR and and enlarging our present areas too.

This Saturday Kathy and I fly to Oklahoma to spend a week with our daughter and her family.  I love this week with her and her husband and their two kids.  Even though they are 1500 miles away, somehow spending an uninterrupted week makes the distance more tolerable.  Their church has a new Celebrate Recovery going and I’m giving my testimony to them on Sunday evening when they meet.  I gave it a year ago while there.  The group was brand new at that time.  It will be good to see the ones attending and listen to their stories of God working through their hurts, hangups and habits.