Category Archives: Mary Bea Miller

Do I Trust You?

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Lanie| 4 Comments
By Mary Bea Miller
When I first heard this song I was in a very dark place.   Something had happened to me that I interpreted as God not being trustworthy or not loving me or caring for me as I thought He would and should.  I had been angry and miserable for over a year.  When He broke into my dark place, He exposed my self-righteous judgement of His actions for what they were, and I was challenged, and quite anxious, to rebuild my relationship with Him on a solid foundation of unconditional trust.  This song became like a mantra.  I would listen to it, sobbing, crying, trying to catch my breath, and then put in on again.  Over and over until He worked its beautiful truth into me, like leaven into the dough, permeating the whole lump of me.  I am so grateful for this revelation of TRUST.  God has permission to do whatever He wills in my life.  (He is LORD, after all.)  And I am committed to trust Him no matter what.

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Until Further Notice: Celebrate Everything

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Lanie| 10 Comments
I have a confession to make.
I love Passover and Easter.
Actually, I love all the rememberings in the calendar.  They provide a beautiful rhythm to our life.
When I first believed, I wanted to rid myself of any and all religious trappings. (“Maybe we shouldn’t put up a Christmas tree.  You kno
w that scripture in Jeremiah…”)
I have come to see that religious trappings—like the rest of us—become beautiful at the foot of the cross.  And I am now equipped to see that they remain there. Other than the fact that they help me remember and consecrate a day, they are of no value or importance.  It is an offering. These ‘acts’ have been offered by me, to Jesus; “This day is different.  I don’t dye eggs every day.  I only do this once a year, when Jesus is teaching me again about freedom from slavery.  So I don’t go about my business as usual today.  Today I am dying eggs as unto the Lord!”


Every Summer is my anniversary and birthday.  I love to celebrate and remember the gift of life and the gift of love.
Every Autumn we feast and give thanks corporately for the abundant provision and blessings in our lives. I know I thanked Him last year, but I’m thankful for even more stuff THIS year, so I think I’ll do it again.  And again.  And again…..
Every Winter we remember how Jesus came to Earth, like the dormant seeds in the frozen ground. All-powerful, divine life arrived in seed form, complete.  Completely amazing!  And rather than diminishing my remembering, I enhance, enforce it even, with baking cookies and giving gifts in His honor.
Every Spring we remember the exodus and the cross and the resurrection. And whether the master was an Egyptian or just plain old sin, I am no longer a slave.  And, yes, I know that crucifixion was relatively common, and lots of people were crucified.  But only one person was crucified for me.  Only Jesus bought my freedom.  Only Jesus loved me so much, that He couldn’t bear to live without me, so He had to die for me.
 I know that having a Passover Seder does not tick any religious boxes, but I love it.  I see Jesus all over it!  It thrills me to see how He has woven Himself all through the Old Testament!  Almost like a secret code that is mostly invisible until you see Him, and then it’s like, He is all you can see.
Don’t tell me that Easter has nothing to do with eggs.  Easter has everything to do with EVERYTHING! And as I remember Jesus, the meal, th
e garden, the betrayal, the cross, the resurrection I want to celebrate and worship and consecrate and sanctify everything within my reach!  Everything I can touch!  Hams and casseroles and cakes that look like lambs and –YES!  EVEN EASTER EGG HUNTS!!! (There.  I said it!)
I know it’s silly, but so is slopping lamb’s blood around your door. God can speak to us though anything if He has our attention.  So just relax and worship Him this season.  (And pass the Cadbury Cream Eggs!)  And, until further notice, CELEBRATE EVERYTHING!!!
 

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Comfort Zones

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Lanie| 7 Comments

Recently the Sunday morning sermons have been about comfort zones, so it has been on my mind now for a few weeks.  I keep remembering what Keith Green said about being comfortable:

How can you be so dead, when you’ve been so well fed,

Jesus rose from the grave, and you, you can’t even get out of bed,

Psalm 119:32 says: I will run the way of Your commandments, for You will enlarge my heart.

The longer I walk with Him, the more aware I become that this ‘ENLARGING’ work is rarely painless.  It requires pulling, stretching, CHANGING!

We talk a lot about ‘becoming more like Jesus’, but I think that maybe we only see this picture one half at a time, because the other side of  that must be that I am becoming less like ME!!  That doesn’t just mean I’ll be less grumpy, less selfish, less prideful, less lazy.  I think it means I’ll be less set in my MARY-ways!

If we had more of an awareness of this, we would not be so quick to remark how something is “just not my ‘thing’.

We are often much too quick to use our own personalities, cultures and comfort zones as the plum line to determine what we will consider doing, or even what we will approve of you doing!

Seeing as I am an American living in Wales, I come across cultural differences frequently.  I promise I am not trying to make my little corner of Swansea into “Memphis-East”, but I am stubbornly determined to be open to God doing things that we’ve never seen Him do before, in ways that perhaps have never even occurred to us.  Maybe even in ways that cause us to be a bit uncomfortable.

There was an impassioned plea from the Holy Spirit at Celebration 2009 when He challenged us all through Andrew Scotland, saying, “Let Me inconvenience you.”  When the Lord spoke that word to Andrew, it wasn’t to stop him doing something wrong.  It was just that whatever Andrew was about to do was now going to take longer, or cost more.  Most of the time we equate efficiency with the will of God. Certainly God should be cool with that, right?  But what if tomorrow God wants to use us in a way that requires our plans to go topsy-turvey? We are quick to judge people who pray rote prayers and have to sit in the same pew every Sunday, but aren’t we all stuck in our ruts in other areas?  For my more independent and rebellious friends it may even be the rut of Never-Doing-Anything-the-Same-Way-Twice!

We serve a God that says “when we give we receive”, “the last shall be first”, “if we lose our life we save it”.  Face it!  He is not going to do things that always make sense to us or fit our definition of effiiency.  And the tighter we grip on to our usual way of doing things, the less likely we are to hear His voice, and the less likely we are to have the opportunities we long for to participate with Him in establishing His Kingdom here on Earth.

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Come Away , My Beloved

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Abby| 12 Comments

By Mary Bea Miller

I would like to share a devotion that has blessed and comforted me for many years. It is written like a love letter to us from the Lord.  It is titled, “The Call of Love”, from a book called  “Come Away, My Beloved” by Frances J. Roberts

(I have updated some of the old-fashioned language.)

 “O My beloved, abide under the shelter of the lattice—for I have betrothed you to Myself, and though you are sometimes indifferent toward Me, My love for you is at all times as a flame of fire.

My ardor never cools.

My longing for your love and affection is deep and constant.

Do not wait any longer, looking for an opportunity to have more time to be alone with Me.  Take it, though you leave the tasks at hand.  Nothing will suffer.

Things are of less importance than you think.

Our time together is like a garden full of lowers, whereas the time you give to ‘things’ is as a field full of stubble.

 I love you, and if you could slow down enough to feel My heartbeat, you would discover many things, the knowledge of which would give you the sustaining strength you so desperately need.

 I bore your sins

 And I wish to carry your burdens.

I will give you the gift of a light and merry heart.  My love bower is the place where you shall find it, for My love dispels all fear and is a cure for every ill.

Lay your head upon My breast and lose yourself in Me. You shall experience resurrection life and peace; the joy of the Lord shall become your strength; and wells of salvation shall be opened within you.

 

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Valuing the Artist’s Work

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Abby| 2 Comments

By Mary Bea Miller

(October 25, 2007  Thursday morning worship with Visible School)

At any artist’s exhibition, you see some of their best work and perhaps some of their less than best work.  Unless you know the artist well, you would never know which works he or she considered to be the truest expression of the picture they saw in their mind.

Creation is like God’s art gallery.  We can look around us and draw conclusions as to what He likes and, more importantly, what He is like. 

And in case we needed a descriptive commentary on the work, God also expressed and recorded for us, a value judgment on His work.  The first bit, light and darkness….earth, moon, sun, stars….mountains, seas….fish, birds, animals….all glorious!  Each part representing a piece of His heart.  Each expressing a part of the picture in His mind.  But it was just the background;  the setting of the stage.  And each time the pronounced judgment was merely, “It was good.”

But then……the pièce de résistance! He created man.  The star of the show!  In His very own image. His self-portrait.  His autobiography.   And the value judgment this time was, “Very Good!”

Why, then, do we sometimes emphasize what the Artist Himself did not mean to emphasize?  And at the same time, do we sometimes view as less lovely the part of the creation that the Artist saw as His ‘magnum opus’?

We walk through a photo exhibition and ooh and ahhh over sunsets and rainbows, butterflies and hummingbirds, whales spouting, roses budding….praising God for His creativity, His diversity, His imagination….then we walk out onto the street and resume slandering, criticizing, and demeaning, belittling the very part of the work that God called ‘very good’.

Should our challenge not be to love what He loves, and esteem what He esteems, and value what He values?

When He fills the earth with His glory it is not with sparkly, glowing clouds.  Instead He fills us, with Himself.  Now THAT’S Glorious!

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The Ugly Roots of Ingratitude

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Lanie| 7 Comments

By Mary Bea Miller

Bought with the precious blood of Christ……..Redeemed ……..Ransomed……..Rescued……..Reconciled…..

 

While we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.
Romans 5:6

 

….while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  Romans 5:8

 

For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.
Romans 5:10

 

If these verses are true—they are—then gratitude should be our ‘Default’ setting every day of our lives.  Every moment we live, every breath we take, is a gift, from a supremely benevolent Father to His extremely undeserving, unloving, rebellious, wicked, selfish children.  The only things in us that are not ugly, that are worth anything, are the fingerprints left by our gracious Creator.

Conversely, ingratitude should be like a red flag to us that something is wrong somewhere in our hearts.  We need only follow the trails back to see what is at the root of these ungrateful attitudes.

 

I see two different ways of being ungrateful: one is passive and one is active.  The passive one is when I’m not feeling UN-grateful.  I’m just not acknowledging that there was any transaction occurring at all.  The active one is when we are totally aware of the transaction, but feel that it is wrong or insufficient in some way.

 

Let’s look at the passive one first.

When you have eaten all you want, thank the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.
Deuteronomy 8:10-14

Be careful that you don’t forget the LORD your God. Don’t fail to obey his commands, rules, and laws that I’m giving you today. You will eat all you want. You will build nice houses and live in them. Your herds and flocks, silver and gold, and everything else you have will increase. When this happens, be careful that you don’t become arrogant and forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of slavery in Egypt.

 

 When I fed you, you were full.  When you were full, you became arrogant.  That is why you forgot Me.
Hosea 13:6

 

It seems from these verses that arrogance is a root of forgetting to be grateful.  I guess that happens when we are not consciously aware of the reality of our redemption and we are just going through our days as if we provide for ourselves.  I’m sure I live in this space quite a bit; business as usual, auto-pilot.  I don’t want to call it “arrogance”, I just want to call it ‘normal life’.  But the danger of it is that it leads to idolatry.  I believe that must be because we were created to be a grateful people, and if we don’t see God as our provider and thank Him for the gifts, then we will, ultimately, if unconsciously, attribute His generosity to someone or something else.

Being ungrateful in the active sense is much easier to identify.  Mostly we see it in its full-blown state in bratty children or ‘Divas’, but in more subtle forms we might find in anywhere, even in our mirrors!  It might masquerade as impatience, being critical, fatalistic, perfectionist, untrusting, having ‘control issues’, an ‘entitlement mentality’ or any number of other unlovely characteristics that can all be traced to ingratitude.  The common thread is that we feel angry, disappointed, slighted, or frustrated that things turned out the way they did, or when they did, rather than some other outcome that we had predetermined would have been more beneficial.

At its core, this is also a supremely arrogant stance.  It says to God, “I had a much better plan for this than You did.”  It judges Him, His abilities, His love, His motives, by our own perceptions of a circumstance.  It assumes that our perspective is broader, and our sight clearer, and our hearts more loving than Father God’s. As if………

I first learned this lesson at a very dark time in my life.  My infant son had just been diagnosed with a rare blood disease that left him without the enzymes needed to digest dairy products.  This, of course, meant that he would have to be on a soy formula instead of breast milk.  For a year and a half I was offended at God for not healing him.  (He’s fine now.  It only lasted 4 ½ months, but, even though I tried, I could not start nursing again after that amount of time.)  This was going to be my last child, my last chance to breastfeed.  I had been looking forward to the sweet intimacy of nursing my baby for the whole pregnancy!  It was obvious to me that God must not be as loving or powerful, or knowledgeable as I thought, otherwise why would He want a baby on soy formula instead of breast milk?  My heart grew harder and harder.  Finally, one particularly dark, sleepless night I heard His voice, after 18 months of relative silence.  All He said was, “Your chair is not tall enough.” That’s all He said, but I instantly knew He was referring to a courtroom, and the judge is the one in the tallest chair.  God was letting me know that not only had I been judging Him, (I never would have admitted to that) but I was also totally unsuited to be able to do so, since I could never have a chair taller than His.

Not being grateful for what comes our way is like standing (sitting) in judgment of God.  I never want to treat Him like that again.  He knows me inside and out, endured the cross for my liberty and loves me more than anyone else.  He deserves so much better.

I began a sweet journey back to Trust that night.  I did not know it then, but Trust and Gratitude are neighbors, and they live on the same block. Wonder if they have a spare room for me?

 

 

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The Great Divorce: Chapters 7 & 8

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Lanie| 2 Comments
 By Mary Bea Miller
 

Chapter 7 begins with the main ghostly character, who we are naming ‘Jack,’ having a conversation with a fellow ghost whom he first describes as ”the kind of man I have always instinctively felt to be reliable,” but who later becomes known as “the Hard-Bitten Ghost”.  This ghost’s assessment of Heaven, Hell and life in general is quite dark and negative, “They’re all advertisement stunts.  All run by the same people.  There’s a combine, you know, a World Combine, that just takes an Atlas a decides where they’ll have a Sight.  Doesn’t matter what they choose:  Anything’ll do as long as the publicity’s properly managed.” and after listening to his take on it all ‘Jack’ ends up noting that “A great depression had come over me.”  How many times have you come from a visit with certain friends who have nothing to say except that everything you say and everything you think  doesn’t really work, at least, not for them?  (Give me Pollyanna ANYDAY!!)

Jack was about to succumb and head back to the ‘safety’ of the bus, or at least in that general direction, when he observed another encounter between a female Ghost and one of the Bright People.

This poor woman felt so ashamed to be a ghostly transparent thing in the presence of the beautiful, Bright Solid People that she could not bear it.  Her Bright friend had the most profound thing to say about shame.  He said, “An hour hence and you will not care.  A day hence and you will laugh at it.  Don’t you remember on earth–there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right?  Shame is like that.  If you will accept it–if you will drink the cup to the bottom–you will find it very nourishing; but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.”  

Shame is a very politically incorrect concept these days.  Anyone should be allowed to do anything, without “being made” to feel ashamed.  I love how this Friend describes it, as a cup which must be drunk down before you can proceed.  I see this same idea in the scriptures, Hosea 2:14-15 when the Lord said He would turn the Valley of Achor into a door of hope.  The Valley of Achor was the place where Israel lost a battle because one man had taken some plunder from a previous battle even though the Lord had commanded them not to take anything. (Joshua 7) Men died in battle because of his sin, and his whole family had to be stoned to death as a result.  Even bringing up the name of the place reminded the people generations later of the embarrassing, shameful deeds.  They would go miles out of their way to avoid that place, but the Lord says, we must go back, accept, admit, confront, repent and He will transform the shameful place into a doorway, a passage to HOPE!  I love this.  Have you ever heard this difficult call?  Have you tasted the sweet fruit on the other side?

The last part of this encounter with the ashamed ghost lady is quite startling, but it is addressed and partially explained in a later chapter when Jack asks his Bright friend about it.  Maybe we should save any discussion regarding the Unicorn Trick for that later chapter.

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Discipleship and Friendship

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Lanie| 8 Comments

By Mary Bea Miller

Listen, O Israel!  The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.  And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.  And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.  Repeat them again and again to your children.  Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.  Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders.  Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.  Deut. 6:6-8

One of the teachers of the Law came and heard them debating.  Noticing that Jesus had given him a good answer, he asked Him,  ”Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”  ”The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’  The second is this:  ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’  There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:28-31

Most the time we hear the word “DISCIPLE” it is used in some verb form, referring to a class, a program or a specific kind of relationship between people.  The word “DISCIPLE”, meaning “Learner” or “student” appears more than 270 times in the New Testament, but always as a noun, mostly referring to ‘The Twelve”.  This really surprised me, because I had to admit that most of my thoughts and opinions regarding ‘Disciplship’ have not come from specific passages, but more from gleanings and inferences. (I am a little uncomfortable with this, but I’ll live.)

BUT–putting all these verses together does leave me with two main things.

#1- God always meant for our walk with Him to be a way of life; absolutely intentional, but not a meeting in a building with an appointed time to begin and end.  Jesus did not take His ‘disciples’ to meetings.  He walked along the road, traveled in their boats, and went fishing with them. We should never be able to turn our Christianity on and off, or have different levels of morality in the ways we relate to a business associate than we do to a fellow motorists. Or one way for the waitresses at the diner and another for our neighbors. Do we treat our family members differently than church friends, or church leaders? Sadly, those closest to us usually get the worst treatment.  I love what Ann Landers once said, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

Don’t we want our lives to read like one beautiful love letter to Jesus, and not cut and pasted, spliced together bits of Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights?

#2- Our love for God is totally connected to, outworked in, manifested, and even proved (1 John) by our love for other humans.

I may not be sure about the Biblical similarities and differences between a “discipleship” relationship and just a friendship, but I personally believe that the very best bits of every human encounter, be it professional, commercial, familial, peer, or anything else, are the ways that God uses these encounters to press me towards Him.

The Gospels and the Epistles are full of instructions on how to treat ‘one another.’ Everybody is a ‘one another.’ If we remove the artificial distinctions that we use for categorizing  and dividing people and relationships and just try to love each person the very best we can in any given circumstance, wouldn’t that be a nice way to live?

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The Temple of God

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Abby| 6 Comments

By Mary Bea Miller

Do you not know that your body is the temple, the very sanctuary, of the Holy Spirit Who lives within you, Whom you have received as a Gift from God? You are not your own, you were bought with a price purchased with a preciousness and paid for, made His own. So then, honor God and bring glory to Him in your body.   

1 Corinthians 6:19-20  The Amplified Bible

I was expecting a very different topic when I volunteered for the post with this Scripture verse. But after I got into it a bit, I realized it wasn’t at all saying what I thought I was going to write about.  So, I had to start with a completely blank slate.  Not a bad thing when you’re studying the Bible.  Here’s what I learned:

SIX ARGUMENTS: Verse 19 begins the sixth of 6 arguments in this chapter which all start with the words, “Do you not know”.  This one goes right to the core of the defense of moral purity.

OWNERSHIP:  The stated reason that we are required by God to abstain from sex outside of marriage has to do with ownership.  “You are not your own.”

Americans don’t swallow this one very easily.  Anyone with a sin nature would have trouble with it, I guess.  But this verse is worded so plainly and put so simply, it leaves precious little room to wiggle out of it.  I really love the comprehensive lists used to illustrate Whose we are, whose we are NOT and how we got there, found in Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible:

“the saints, who are neither their own, nor other men’s, nor satan’s, but God’s; not only by creation, but by choice and covenant; and Christ’s by gift, by purchase, and powerful grace.”

PURPOSE BUILT:  When we were traveling in Ireland once, we met the owners of the very nice B&B where we were staying.  They explained to us that they built it themselves, and designed it specifically to be used as a B&B.  Now if you have stayed in a few B&B’s you might have noticed that some are easier to stay in than others.  That is because most of them started out as homes, not enterprises.  They were built for families, not paying guests.  But this place in Lisdoonvarna was “purpose built”.  And it was noticeably easier to stay in than most of the others.  This verse in 1 Corinthians says the same thing about us.  We were ‘purpose built’ by God, for Him to live in.  He built it with His occupancy in mind, just the way He likes it.  Then paid for it AGAIN, with His own Son, because we had let in an enemy who had acquired squatters’ rights, and had to be forcibly evicted.

Clarkes’ Commentary on the Bible has this to say:

Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost – What an astonishing saying is this! As truly as the living God dwelt in the Mosaic tabernacle, and in the temple of Solomon, so truly does the Holy Ghost dwell in the souls of genuine Christians; and as the temple and all its utensils were holy, separated from all common and profane uses, and dedicated alone to the service of God, so the bodies of genuine Christians are holy….And ye are not your own? – Ye have no right over yourselves, to dispose either of your body, or any of its members, as you may think proper or lawful; you are bound to God, and to Him you are accountable.

GLORIFYING GOD:  As much as we love using the verses saying things like “God sees my heart” as a defense for a behavior of which someone might disapprove, this verse makes a strong case for the point that our outward actions have a real capacity to bring God glory…..or not (implied). And just in case we try to spiritualize it, Paul adds the prepositional phrase “in your body”.  Sound of another door slamming shut.  But it’s not just Paul.  Matthew and Peter seem to agree.

Matt 5:16: Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. …

1 Pet 2:12:  Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. …

So here I am at the end of a pretty hard-nosed chapter of Scripture.  Exits have been blocked, every way of escape is closed.  Unlike many churches over the centuries, I refuse to draw conclusions as to what this means to your life, besides what it says explicitly regarding fornication, but each of us is left to ask the Holy Spirit ourselves.  It truly is the only honest response to 1 Corinthians chapter 6.  What do I do that might be inappropriate for a house of His?  In what ways do I act as if I have retained ownership?

Because I long for my temple to be a place that glorifies Him everyday, all the time, I will be asking these hard questions, and listening hard for His loving response.

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The Year of the Sunflower

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Abby| 8 Comments

By Mary Bea Miller

Some of my friends might remember a few years ago when the Lord seemed to give me a “theme” for the year.  It appeared within 2 days of my birthday, in the form of 2 birthday cards, a new top and a birthday cake, all from different people, all with buttons on them. After the 3rd “button” thing, I remember thinking, “Buttons AGAIN? Maybe this means something. Okay, Lord, if I get one more button thing, I’m really going to press in and see if You are speaking something to me.” A few hours later, I was being sung the Birthday song by a sweet bunch of friends, and blowing out candles which ringed a lovely cake decorated with BUTTONS!  That year began a work of the Holy Spirit in my life regarding relationships that I called “Temporal Joinings.”  I was beginning to learn to hold my relationships more loosely, with open palms.

So THIS year I woke up on my birthday morning in a cottage on the outskirts of a little French village, surrounded by fields of SUNFLOWERS.

I began to hear the gentle nudgings of the Spirit, telling me what I am about to be learning this year.  Here’s what I know so far:

SUNFLOWERS ARE…

Consistently responsive (OUCH!)

They reflect the radiance of the SON.

They expect to see Him every day.

They are full of fruit – well, seeds, but, anyway…

There they are, millions of them in a field, blindingly bright, making a statement that could probably be seen from space!

And then, there is the odd seed that fell into the patch beside the path, all by itself, tall, lovely, still facing toward the SON.  Whether they are one in a field of millions, or one all alone in a pot on a London balcony, the devotion, the expectation, is still the same. The environment is irrelevant. All that matters is the SON.

And when it’s dark, and they cannot face the SON, they do the only smart thing they could possibly do…..they bow their heads.  To me that means pray.

This is a next step for me, after learning to loosen my grip on my friendships. The next thing now is for me to keep my eyes on Jesus.  Sounds simple.  Not for me. There is a “will-less-ness” implied in this that always trips me up. I get caught up in doing good things, or I get caught up in thinking that it is important for me to be comfortable in this life.

Truly, I want to want Him more than I want to do stuff for Him, and certainly more than I want to do stuff for me.  And especially important, when I can’t see Him, it is NOT time to try harder or pedal faster…..it’s time to stop….bow my head…..pray.

 

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