Today I had a most interesting thing happen while I was having my devotions.  I’m now reading in Ezekiel.  God is having Ezekiel reinforce the message to the Israelites as to why they are now in captivity and Israel/Jerusalem is in ruins.  Ezekiel is charged over and over to give these messages.  I was admiring within myself the relationship God and Ezekiel had with one another.  It is like best friends.  They trust one another.

As I was journaling I told God I wished I had a best friend.  I have scores of friends but if I were to say I have a best friend I wouldn’t know for sure who it is and I wouldn’t even know how to differentiate him from the score of friends.  As I was writing this I was nudged by God saying this is what He wants with (us) me.  He doesn’t just want to be friends with man or to be God with man.  The reason He says in scripture He gave us a heart of flesh is so He would be at the core of us–our best friend.  All of a sudden as I was writing and processing this, I realized those 3 words–heart of flesh–represent God as HEART and flesh as man.  The “of” tells the heart is in flesh.  The heart is the core or essence of the flesh.  There is substance making up the flesh but the heart of the flesh is what gives it life.  God isn’t wanting to just be the leader of my life like a person in charge.  He wants to be leader of my life as my best Friend who I trust with all my being.

All this time I’ve been journaling to God (the past 2 years and 3 months) and now I finally realize the greatest message–He wants to be my BEST FRIEND.  He doesn’t just want to be my Lord and Master, but to be my FRIEND.  There is probably more to add to this message, but this is as far as my words will go in describing it for today.  I’m rather overwhelmed at this moment.  Taking what I’ve known in my head for years and now knowing it in my heart is a remarkable discovery!

This morning as I began my devotions my mind began to drift into areas of today and then quickly into the several days ahead.  As I did this I started to have all these questions arising about the different activities which are to take place in the near future: “Who is going to take care of this and that?”, “What is my role in it?”, and so much more.  All of a sudden I felt The Holy Spirit’s nudge.  He was saying I’m stepping right into what yesterday’s lesson was all about.  I suddenly became aware of how often I do this and just how much it represents my flesh.  It is going to take me some time to break this habit, but I do want to do this.  If Christ is going to be on the throne of my life 24/7, I want Him to be there in charge of me, not just when I think I need Him.  This behavior is a devious one for I’ve thought all these years that I was doing a good job planning.  Now I can see there is no planning taking place in my worry.  In it I eventually come to the place I need to set it aside and let God take control.  So, why not let Christ have the control from the start of this?  I’m going to work on it.

Today we have our monthly Celebrate Recovery Leadership meeting following the worship services.  After it the ministry leaders and I have our own meeting to address some issues which have arisen.  This is actually what started my mind jumping ahead earlier this morning.  Then I quickly went into all kinds of things coming up in the near future–things I can easily get lost in but can’t do anything about until the time is present.  That joy in life can only be real when I consciously keep Christ in my control seat.  I do want to stay in the surrender seat and let Christ stay in the control one.  I know this is what Christ is wanting me to learn as my assignment in today’s journey–one step at a time!

The dilemma I mentioned yesterday is something God is wanting me to address.  However, it is not so much in addressing it by deciding if I am doing too much or not enough or some other reason not thought through.  As I have been working through this in my devotions this morning I find Him saying, “This is all about a matter of trust.”

I have never heard anyone talk about God calling them into something for a defined period of time.  I have heard ones talk about what God called them to do came to an end but they never knew that upfront.  God calls us to do what He asks for the day.  I am finally seeing that when I move beyond the day I step right into fretting/worrying/anxiety.  The bible clearly calls them sins.  This is what God is wanting me to learn from this new awareness He is showing me.  I don’t talk a lot about what anxiousness I sense inside me, but it is usually present to some degree or to a large degree.  God is telling me to let this go.  The way I let it go is to TRUST HIM in the day and then trust Him for all the tomorrows.

As I was working through this in my devotional time this morning there was an unexpected outcome.  All of a sudden I began to sense JOY.  It was as though when I let go of worry I found joy.  JOY is waiting at the door for us when we stop worrying.  One can’t know joy and worry at the same time.  However, joy is hardwired in us when we take captive the option to worry.  God’s Word never says it is ok to worry about this or that and but not ok to worry about these things.  God’s Word says worry is a sin.  I can see clearly now that worry removes TRUST.

I’ve heard a lot about all of this in my life but God is wanting me to apply it to my daily living.  So, here goes day one of intentional living in TRUST rather than the opposite.  And my prize—-JOY!

God is simply AMAZING!  I say this because it is Friday and I just want to spend the day with Him.  I know whatever I do God is with me, but I want to be with Him rather than Him being with me.  It is all a huge mind shift.  Also, it is a fear-breaker and confidence builder.  I use to think confidence aligned with arrogance/ego as I saw in my dad, but the confidence God gives is not that at all.  It is far more about assurance that even though you don’t see all the steps as clearly as you’d like, you can trust God to lead you “one step at a time, one moment at a time….” as the Serenity Prayer states.

I write this first paragraph because I’m caught right now in an emotional/mental dilemma I said I wouldn’t do again.  It is about the amount of work I’d accept for this year from the consulting world.  More time is seemingly needed where I am presently working and one more district is needing an interim amount of time.  In times past I’d say yes because it felt good to be wanted and needed.  Today, however, it seems God is shedding Light on this telling me to do as He is asking.  I have all these questions come to mind quickly like:  “What about the time needed for recovery work?”, What about time for my family, grandkids, choir, Christmas rehearsal, quartet, garden clean-up, etc.?”  I then hear, “…one day at a time, one moment at a time, taking hardship as a pathway to peace.”

The journey God gives is quite amazing.  I don’t want to spend another minute on this journey with Him anyplace but in the Lead.  Learning to walk this way throughout each and every day is now my new lesson.  Join me?

The Journey Continues but in so doing, the Light gets brighter showing more vividly where the path is leading.  This is the first time I’ve begun to understand and see this.  My human nature had learned fear as my way of dealing with what was ahead of me.  I would be excited in my spirit but coupled right with the excitement has been a tremendous amount of fear.  The fear would be about another failure, another opportunity for being abused by new people I’d be meeting, etc.  A fear that would isolate and paralyze me from taking any step my excitement might want me to take.  God is helping me see that the path for which the journey takes is one of His Making.  The Light He is providing isn’t a Light that shows me down the road several years.  It is a Light for the moment and sometimes for the day.  It is as if it is the confidence to go into the day knowing I’m completing my day’s assignment with God at the helm without seeing anything but God’s opportunity to serve Him.

I sat by my grandson last night watching my granddaughter’s volleyball game.  (They won by the way!)  I was listening to him talk about so many things he’s now doing since he is living on his own in his newly purchased house.  He is not afraid of stepping into many of man’s entertaining opportunities and he even sees them as fun and adventurous.  I listen and quickly see how so many men get caught in their addictions.  Soon these “entertaining things” turn into more than just fun.  “I need them to make me feel better”.  He and I can talk about these things as time moves on but I saw something I FEARED as a youth while he is enticed.  I see for the first time that neither is right or wrong, they are just how man handles man’s ways.  God was helping me see that these ways without God’s Light turn to darkness and sometimes turn to darkness quickly.  I don’t fear this as I once would, but I am much more awake to the need to follow God’s nudges as He gives them.

God’s ways and His nudges do seem at time to be overwhelming and impossible.  Yet, as I am learning just how gentle, kind and long-suffering He is, I want to complete whatever He asks for my confidence is growing tremendously in this arena.  Wow, God is Good!

The word for today–LORD.  There are 4 guys in our recovery class for abuse meeting on Tuesday nights.  (There are 9 in the ladies group but I just know women are far more able to face these demons than we men are.  We have to be strong in and of ourselves, we think.)  As we were talking through the lesson which was all about awakening to the areas of abuse/neglect from our past, I kept hearing others say things like: “I couldn’t do that because I feared”, or “I couldn’t take that step because I knew I’d fail”, etc.  These sounded just like my messages.  However, this time I was hearing it in retrospect to what I was learning from the lesson.  God gave us Jesus Christ to create a pathway to Him.  But, if we never let Christ be Lord of our life, we never allow the pathway to God to be cleared.  We are constantly dealing with the garbage strewn throughout the path.  Boy, can I see this now.

This morning I’m reading in Ezekiel about God’s message to him.  God tells him the children of Israel have been stubborn and unwilling to let Him be their Lord and King.  They wanted to have an earthly king and be lead my man’s wisdom rather than God’s.  Now they were experiencing the consequences of their hard-heartedness but they were still not getting the message.  When God showed me just a few years ago the verse Jeremiah 24:7, “…I will remove the heart of stone…and give you a heart of flesh”,  I knew He was talking about my hardened heart toward sensitivity to man.  What I’m finally awakening to is that God was wanting me to awaken to being sensitive to HIM.  The original heart He gave me (us) was a heart of flesh–sensitivity to Him.  Sin turns this heart toward self–selfishness.  I will never be sensitive to man the way God is until I’m capable and willing to be sensitive to Him.  This looks like obeying His nudges, allowing myself to feel what He has me see and what He has me hear.  I then do not respond out of my willfulness, but out of His nudges.

LORD,  this word means “leader”.  If Jesus Christ are going to be LORD of my life I must not only have Him on the throne of my life, but willingly respond to Him as my Lord.  This isn’t when I feel ok about it, but each time He nudges.  I have so much to learn about this.  A “heart of flesh” is a powerful gift God is wanting me to understand in a richer way.  The garbage strewn in my pathway will be cleared by God as I allow Him to fully heal my heart and respond in trust to His Leading as LORD.

I finished my devotions this morning, refilled my coffee cup and went right to doing my recovery group lesson for tonight.  I’m not working today so I had planned to use the time after devotions to finish it.  Well, I did do just that.  In so doing I forgot all about doing my blog!  The lesson required each participant to build a timeline of their life from birth to present putting the pro’s of life above the line and the neg’s of life below it.  This was actually last week’s lesson in part but none of the guys had put anything on it except for myself.  I’d done this type of assignment before so it was easier for me to process through it.  Tonight we are completing all that wasn’t done last week.  Everyone agreed to getting theirs done.

In having done 7-Pillars (class for sexually addicted men) a couple years ago and now starting the class for abuse, I can finally see what I’ve never been able to process for myself.  This is all about Christ living on the throne of my life and The Holy Spirit living within me.  In 7-Pillars and in The Conquer DVD’s, the author says Christ’s throne is in the amygdala portion of our brain.  I said at the time I thought “that was stupid”.  Why would Christ want to live in the primal portion of me?  Little did I realize at the time how critical this statement is.  Now that I’m going through the class for abuse do I realize this portion of my brain was damaged severely from the early childhood abuse.  I had so many false beliefs and fears controlling me.  Only now do I see how critical it is to have Christ in this area for me.  This is the area driving all the lies I have believed about myself for as long as I’ve lived.  Even though I might fear something, Christ compels me to not be paralyzed by the fear but to step into it and complete what His Holy Spirit nudges to do and do it from His Strength rather than my own self-will.

Finally, I am awakening more and more to this reality.  In all of this, the fear of telling becomes easier and easier because I do this through God’s nudges within rather than out of sheer self-disciple like when I gave my testimony 9 years ago to our Celebrate Recovery group.  That night I can only remember starting to give it and then talking about it in the share group an hour later.  The rest of the time is blank in my mind.  I have no recall of it.  That’s what my brain did with trauma when I was a child and it still has done this until more recently as I’ve been able to live and do what God wants done and do it from His Spirit’s nudges rather than from my own self-will.  I’m so glad to be taking this class for abuse.  It completes a hole within me that God wants filled with Him.

Yes, 36 years ago today I was a nervous wreck!  What was I doing?  I was marrying someone who had never married and I was giving her this scarred, retched man.  She was innocent of whom I was and someday she’d find out her awful mistake.  Yet, I was going to marry her anyway.  These were the thoughts I had 36 years ago today when Kathy said yes to me and I to her.  God has taken all of those lies and turned them into a life of opportunities for Him to show me what a marriage to someone whom He gave me as His gift, was like.  Instead of living in fear as I did then, I want to live in opportunity to complete all God has in store for us.  He is truly an Amazing Father!

Today I started Lamentations–Jeremiah’s laments of Jerusalem and the mighty kingdom which is now in ruins.  As I finished the book of Jeremiah and now reading Lamentations, I wondered how could Judah not take heed to this doom?  It was as though God pointed out that in reading the condensed version of this time, it is easy to see the errors of their actions.  However, look at myself today.  How many times has God shown me a path and I wouldn’t take it for whatever was holding me back?  Look at all the ones I know and look at the way they choose to live.  Is their choice reflective of what God is saying to them?  It is so easy to read a book that spans a lifetime and more and see what wasn’t seen by them.  However, it is not so easily done when one is looking at oneself.

As I journaled this morning I asked God to keep me on track with Him.  I want to not act out of fear and selfishness any longer.  I want to live life as God has intended for Kathy and me completing His perfect will.  For today, the start was taking the time to be with Him this morning and writing this to you.

The nights are longer as fall progresses into the year.  As I began my prayer time this morning it was pitch black out the den window.  I was praying for the darkness to be lifted for those on my prayer list who are struggling or battling to overcome in areas of their lives.  This included my own.  As I finished and opened my eyes the darkness was beginning to be penetrated by the first light of dawn.  I could start to see the outlines of the trees.  It was as though God was saying He is the Light and He will penetrate the very darkness of the soul Satan wants to keep firmly in place.  God is so faithful and I love Him for this.

Tomorrow is Kathy and my 36th wedding anniversary.  However, Monday’s are filled from early morning until choir ends at night.  So, we are taking today to celebrate.  I honestly didn’t know love when Kathy and I first met and even when we had married.  I knew what love wasn’t and shouldn’t be, but to know love and know how to give love–I was groping.  I’m far from good at it today but I sure am not where I was all those years ago.  For one thing, love doesn’t scare me anymore.  It use to mean being touched and hurt with the manipulation from it or the memories which haunted me of this time in my life.  This is what I knew love wasn’t, but how did one get all of this out of your mind and emotions?  This is what God has done and has been doing for me these past 10 years.  Guess who has never wavered in her support during all this time?  You are right–my wife, Kathy.  How I love her for this and thank her for her steadfast love.

God doesn’t get in a hurry as He leads us through life.  Instead, He helps us use what we experience from life to help others as He leads them through their own healing.  Somehow, this is one of God’s finest demonstrations of love.  This support that doesn’t condemn, but supports when one would fall again without it.  How good our God is!

God did some great work yesterday with the recovery ministries we are working with.  We have been needing leadership for our children while their parents are in the recovery programs whether on Tuesday night or Celebrate Recovery on Thursday.  A month ago a lady new to our area volunteered to help.  She is not only help, she is a whirlwind of God’s wisdom and delivery of service.  The kids love her and what she has them doing.  She has taken the curriculum other adults have struggled to use with the kids and made it come to life.  The lessons for the kids are to aligned with the parent’s lessons so kids and parents can have common discussions during the week.  I can finally see this happening–Praise God!

This morning we have over 100 men coming together for a men’s breakfast and speaker.  I’m asking that the pastor in charge announce one last time that the recovery classes on Tuesday will close after this week.  I’m praying for those who want to come but are afraid to address the darkness in their lives for whatever is keeping them in bondage.  The grip of Satan’s lies is powerful until we put it into the Power of God’s Presence–His Light.  How I pray for this to happen for anyone this morning who is still caught.

I often ask myself if I would step forth and ask for help by attending a class like we are offering?  My fears and bondage were not different than what grips anyone today who is caught.  Yet, how I found my freedom from this bondage is through the same Jesus Christ.  I thought I could finish my bondage breaking by getting a program started called Celebrate Recovery.  That was 10 years ago.  Little did I know how God would little by little show me the huge amount of work which was still unaddressed in my life.  All I know is that the same freedom God has given me is there for the asking.  Taking that first step is always the hardest.  Pray for those who still need to take theirs.  It is the start to FREEDOM like one never knew possible!