Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

"I love me some me!" - Terrell Owens

Isn't that the truth!  The longer I have been a Christian, the more I have begun to realize the constant ebb and flow associated with my own selfishness and desires.  Like a huge war for my attention, the battle wages within me with each side taking and giving back ground.  I am not some total jerk who walks around, touting myself as all high and mighty, looking down upon all the little underlings in the world.  It's a subtle, nondescript, underlying fear of losing my own importance.  As if completely thinking about others might somehow diminish my own significance in the grand scheme of things.  It all sounds so funny from the outside, but inside it is a choice that I so badly want to make.

 I firmly believe hat God will make it possible for you to do anything.  I do not believe in God snapping his fingers and changing you into someone completely different.  I believe that His Holy Spirit allows you to become who God wants you to be.  However, the bulk of the work is ours. The Red Sea did not part on it's own.  God did not come down out of the heavens and blow on the water, splitting it in two.  Moses had to raise his staff.  Noah would have died with everyone else had he not built the ark.  In fact, God did not even give him an ark, instead he was told to build it with a set of instructions.  Let's be honest, Ikea could possibly be a Christian store if you look at it through the lens of the story of Noah.  Both stories are usually told as stories of faith and the huge things God can do in our lives.  I always have felt as though they are a story of how God works in our lives, through our willingness to be changed and transformed from everyone else to people of true change for God.

And so, I have been struggling with God telling me that I need to stop worrying about me and get to His work of worrying about others.  Not, He did not shine down rays of sunshine, burn a bush, or even come as a booming voice in my ear.  Instead he uses the Holy Spirit to unsettle me, stir my emotions, and give me the feeling that I am not where I should be with this.  We all have that experience, don't we?  "I should do something about that", your spirit says to you "it should not happen."  So that's where I am today.  I am being stirred to start giving more to others and let God take care of me more.  The response, moreover the result is going to be up to me.  He has given me the ability but I cannot expect Him to change it for me.