| who's really in charge? |

Jesus is supposed to be the Lord of our lives...

Why is it that I feel that this is not the case? I feel like so often, I am the bottom line for decisions that need to be made. I'm the one who chooses what I do everyday. I choose my moods and I decide if I'm going to have a good day, a great day, or a crappy day. I decide what I want to do with my money, I decide if I even want to make money on a particular day. I get to make the rules for myself, and I choose whether or not I want to follow them or not. I have rights, I have privileges, and I can assign or retract both from my life as I deem necessary. I wake myself up in the morning and I put myself to sleep every night. I survive my days and my nights. I don't have to listen to anything that people say, because I am my own person. I stand on my own two feet. I look out for myself, no one else wants to do such things for me. I can't trust people, because they let me down.

When I was pledging for my fraternity, there was a rule that all the pledges had to adhere to. We were not allowed to refer to ourselves in the first person at all. This was crazy, most people thought. All the pledges had to refer to themselves in the third person only. That meant that we couldn't use the words: I, me, my, mine, or myself. This really drove my friends crazy, as well as my pledge brothers. It was really hard to see what the point of speaking in third person was. What I realized as we went on in this process, was the fact that there are a lot of times where we refer to ourselves in our everyday thoughts, prayers, or conversations. Having to change my pattern every time I was about to mention something about myself made me pay special attention to just how often I used such words. After a while, I realized that I was pretty self absorbed. Almost everything that came out of my mouth referred to me. I saw how easy it was to put myself into everything, and not to put God into anything.

One of the secrets that we like to hide from God and from each other sometimes is the fact that we like control. We like to be able to have control of all kinds of things. We like to control situations, feelings, and outcomes. Lots of times when we get frustrated about things, it is because we cannot control circumstances that surround us. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten angry because something did not go the way that I planned it, or something that I couldn't control hampered my plans. I think we like to have the last say in lots of things. We are raised in a society that is very individualistic, and we grow into these ideas that we are our number one priorities. We have to focus on how we feel, what we get out of things, how things affect us, etc. At work, I generally seem to get mad when people don't listen to me, because I have particular insights about things. We are so quick to be able to give 95% of things up to God (actually that might be pretty high), but there is that 5% that God is just not allowed to touch.

"It's better if I can handle that one God"

How much sense does that make? He created us, He provides for us, and we can't give Him everything? All He asks is that we trust Him, and allow Him to shoulder our burdens. What's better than being free of troubles, because we can give them up? We go through a lot of self inflicted suffering throughout our lives. This is mostly due to the fact that we have the mentality: "I've gotten myself into this, and I can get myself out of this." or "lemme try to fix things before I go to God about it". How often have I gone to people, complaining about the things that were going on with me, and how I couldn't do anything to change the situation, only to be met with the question: "have you prayed about it?" and me answering "not yet, I think I can figure this out". Why do we think we can figure out our own things? Why do we think that we can outwit God?! He gave us the intellect that we ABUSE most of the time.

What's the deal? What's holding us back from giving complete control of things over to God? What are we afraid of? It can't be that He will find out about the kind of people that we are, or the things we've done. If it is, I have a secret for you: HE ALREADY KNOWS! A lot of the time, we're so much harder on ourselves than God is on us. We are the ones that don't allow for forgiveness. He's all about forgiving people. We are the ones that hold on to sin and think that it somehow permanently damages us. He's quite the opposite! Once we ask for forgiveness, God completely writes things off as if they've never happened.We are made white as the freshly fallen snow in His eyes; Shouldn't that be enough for us!? How is it possible that we hold ourselves up to a higher standard than God does?

the answer is, for most of us, we are our own little gods...

time for a change yes? He is for us...For a reason!

Give up Lordship to the true Ruler and King of all creation.

I'm out...

| comfortability |

It is very clichéd, but it is true... We humans are very much creatures of habit.

Everyday I have the same morning routine. I get up. I pray. I read some scripture. I try to dwell on it. I pray again. I get out of my bed, grab my toothbrush and head to the bathroom. I wet my brush, apply toothpaste while walking back to my room, start brushing, and turn on some morning music. I brush my teeth for about 5-7 minutes (any less and I feel like I haven't done a thorough job). While brushing my teeth, I use only my right hand (my left hand is used only to hold my toothbrush while I'm rinsing my mouth out). I go back to my room and retrieve my mouthwash, gargle for about 50 seconds, then I'm off to the shower. I get dressed, and then turn my music off and head out to face the day at work.

So I admit that when it's broken down into such anal details, I do sound like I'm pretty obsessive compulsive. This has to be done the same way every time that I do it. I might sound particularly crazy, but I promise that this is not a plan of attack I come up with every night before I wake up (that plan would be the same as every other night... trying to take over the world.) I don't set things in action before each new day, just so that I can repeat it day after day. It's just the way that I've become comfortable doing things. I don't even think about it. I'm so comfortable with the process, that I really just blindly fall into doing them the way that they get done. It's only when I stop and take time to break down my actions, that I realize how specific, rigid, and crazy this all sounds to me.

That's just how it is though, right? We get stuck doing things so often, in the same exact way, that it becomes habitual to us. Living life is just that, and part of living is having things go just the way that we are used to them going. We have ideas of how things should be, and those ideas constantly stay with us, no matter what. Living with secrets is just like that. There may not be a lot of constant thought about the secrets that we have, or the specifics that keep them something to be secretive, but we are constantly carrying them with us. We hold them close to us, and a lot of times we feel lost without them. These things that we hold onto in life are things that are sometimes only understood by us. The idea is that maybe if we were to let people in on them, they would be freaked out by the secrets. Of course, we don't want to have that happen to us. With that, we decide that it'd be the best thing if we learn to live comfortably while keeping these secrets with us.

Sadly enough, the things that are the secrets in our lives usually affect how we define ourselves. For example: I would always feel alone. That was my secret... Even in a room full of people (friends or not), I could feel like no one got me or understood me. That thought constantly made me feel like I was alone. That secret led me to start alienating myself from people. I would begin to deliberately sabatoge social situations and blame things on the fact that I was made to feel like I was alone. No one understood me or cared about me, so it was ok to be solitary. I got very comfortable with living life like that. I was so comfortable in fact, that I would deny myself chances for heavy social interaction altogether. When other people would call me out for being hermit-like, I would cower in fear. I thought they would try to discredit my secret or challenge the ways that I was comfortable!

A lot of times, I think that we Christians view our faith like that too. We get comfortable in seeing our faith in the same way all the time. A lot of times, our beliefs are so static. We read the Bible with the same lens, we pray in the same way all the time. We have the same way of connecting with God, or even having ways of experiencing Him. We get set in our ways, and we have a cow when a different way is presented to us. "How can someone tell me how to relate to God?!? I've been doing it for years, and I've not had any problems." We have the tendency to really latch on to the ways that we are introduced to God, generally with little deviation.

How do we get past doing or feeling things when they are so comfortable to us? How do we open ourselves up to new ways of doing, feeling, or even experiencing things in life? We have to challenge our comfortability! This would include even our better habits. When dealing with our faith, we definitely have to think outside of the box (such a corporate idea, that I feel connected to every ceo in the universe right now). It's true though, Jesus was so revolutionary, because He was never overly comfortable with anything. He was able to be in a state of constant change.Being a certain way was not good enough for Him. Having a standard relationship with His heavenly father was not good enough for Him. When we die to our comfortability in things, we can let ourselves be open to experiencing new, different, and awesome things. Jesus was not comfortable in carrying secrets with Him. He really included His community when thinking about things and doing things. Holding onto these secrets and being comfortable with them make it hard to get rid of them. Keeping things in the open is truly freeing. In God's vision, the world was void of secrets, there was true intimacy with Him and with other people. He calls us to be part of a revolution! A revolution in which we develop real community with each other, in order to really love and uplift one another. In order to do that, we have to be able to become uncomfy with being secretive. Let's try to set ourselves free.

What are you too comfortable with?

I'm out...