The journey does continue, and with it are God’s challenges to me. God has been so gracious in the past six months to free me from the old belief system that I am unworthy of God’s Love. Included in this was the belief that I could never be good enough for the Holy Spirit to find residence in me. Learning the 3-R’s: Recognize, Rebuke and Replace have been the tool for this learning. Once I recognized the lies of my old beliefs I could then replace them with the 3-S’s: Self-love, Self-appreciation and Self-confidence. During all of this time I have also learned that such focus on “self” is not arrogant as my dad would say. It is actually the 3rd S–self-confidence. When I was finally able to replace unworthiness with self-confidence (by believing this), I found my pride wanted to make self capitalized–SELF. I saw within me the desire to be strong in ME alone. God teaches that to be strong it takes a team: God, ourselves and someone we trust. Self is 1/3 of the team. So in order to love myself and appreciate all God wants for me I need to recognize the rest of the team and use them “…one day at a time, one moment at a time accepting hardship as a pathway to peace”. Our own pride coupled with Satan’s continuous tempting lies, will quickly create an arrogant, self-confident, stubborn human who will look just like this–arrogant.

I write all of this today because I can now see how quickly one can take these gifts God has offered us and turn them into flesh rather than gifts. To appreciate self, one has to recognize that self alone in the flesh can quickly be prideful, arrogant, stubborn for all the wrong reasons. God is asking us to use the team He provides to keep us balanced and spiritually stable. It has taken me a long time to shift from the fears of being like my brother and dad and using them as my spiritual barometer, to letting Jesus Christ become my barometer and looking only to Him with the daily help of my team.