Today is a day when God stopped me and said, “It is time.  Are you going to trust me fully and live by faith or are you going to keep your hands on the control switch of your life?” The struggles in my life of late have been entirely centered around what frustrates me and the fact I can’t change it.  Even though every day I surrender these frustrations to God and then move on through the day, I still keep myself directly connected to the problems so I can “do something” the moment I can.  Yes, I am a doer.  The problem with this is that I often do ahead of acting on faith so that God leads me into the doing He wants done rather than the doing I see needed.  This character defect of mine runs deep within me.

In Galatians: 3 Paul is writing to the people about total faith.  This was my scripture reading today.  Because of my present circumstance of this winter and the helplessness I feel not being able to assist like I wish I could, I feel anxious, troubled and at times tempted to relapse.  This morning my devotional reading was about living totally in faith, my scripture reading was about this and the book, The Nature of Freedom, was all about FAITH.  It seems God is saying, “Earnie, do you get it now?”  The sad thing is that I suddenly had this strong feeling–I don’t want to give this up because I get a sense of pride from it.  When I’m strong I’m not like dad or Rich.  Yet, the reality is that when pride is interfering with acting on faith in God I am acting just like my dad did.

As I was journaling through this awakening just an hour ago God said, “Let me grow the seed of FAITH in you replacing this sense of pride.  The taproot for FAITH is a healthy one where this other one is not.  In order to do this I told God to have at it.  Now that I see this I never want to continue in it.  He reminded me that I will face this crossroad many times in days ahead, but I have this moment to anchor in how I respond to it.  To God be the Glory!