2.5 If you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat
Comparison will lead to pride and a false sense of superiority if I’m ahead and misery if I’m behind. Or worse, I will discount and bury the irreplaceable treasure that the Lord of the Gift has given to me alone.
Your life—what you do with what I gave you—is a matter of supreme importance… unrealized potential is a sin — a very serious sin — the tragedy of the unopened gift. Comfort will often keep us from growth. Imagine watching all that God might have done with your life if you had let him…heaven will be that place where we finally experience the fullness of adventure, creativity, and fruitfulness we were made for.
Others have come before you. Others will come after you. But this is your day.
Is there any challenge in your life now that is large enough that you have no hope of doing it apart from God’s help? If not, consider the possibility that you are seriously under-challenged.
A major theme that characterizes resilient persons is their surprising exercise of control in a stress-filled environment…Instead of becoming passive, they focused as much attention as possible on whatever possibilities for control remained.
Someone once asked a desert father named Abba Anthony, “What must one do to please God?” The first two pieces of advice were expected: Always be aware of God’s presence, and always obey God’s Word. But the third was surprising: “Whatever you find yourself—do not easily leave.”… so leaving will always look more attractive in the short run. But over the long haul, leaving easily has a tendency to produce people who live in a pattern of giving up.
Self-preoccupation is actually self-defeating and produces loneliness.
Fear disrupts faith and becomes the biggest obstacle to trusting and obeying God.
When a fear response is triggered, our bodies go into action. Quick energy hormones, like adrenaline [æˈdrɛnəˌlɪn], get pumped into muscles and the bloodstream. Blood drains from the skin’s surface and gets diverted into large muscles, like legs, for a quick getaway. Your heart pounds to enable your body to go into overdrive. The eyes widen and pupils expand to take in the maximum amount of information. Many of the body’s other systems — for reproduction, digestion, and so on — shut down to mobilize us for action.
When you take a challenge, it builds the core of who you are, even if you don’t perform flawlessly…When you are in a situation that creates fear, but you face it head-on, you will feel a rush of satisfaction in knowing you displayed courage. …… If you live in fear, you will never experience the potential that God has placed in you…… This is your life. You can’t get out of it. So get into it.
Fear and hiding go together like adolescence and hormones.
Taking one single step of action can be extremely powerful in robbing failure of its power.……Failure is refusing to run the race at all.
Hope is the fuel that the human heart runs on.
Two laws that govern your life: (1) law of cognition: you are what you think; (2) law of exposure: your mind will think most about what it is most exposed to.
If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate. To meditate means to think about something over and over. Let it simmer in your mind. Reflect on it from different angles until it becomes part of you.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Psychologists tell us that people develop rituals for whatever things are important to them.
honko-second: the time between when the light changes and the person behind you honks his horn
You may be in that every vulnerable moment right now — you have let go what God has called you to let go of, but you can’t feel God’s other hand catching you yet.
Waiting is something only the humble can do with grace. … Waiting humbles me in ways I need to be humbled.
God’s voice is never frantic. When you hear desperate thoughts, you can know it is not God speaking. You can wait in confident humility.
Do all you can to stay in the stream of the Spirit’s power — be very obedient as the Spirit guides you. Keep praying, and don’t assume you are on your own strength. Maybe there are particular disciplines helping you catch the Spirit’s power — solitude, memorizing Scripture, simply getting enough rest. Identify these and be very diligent in them, build on them, and enjoy the ride.
Sometimes walking is all you can do. But in those times, walking is enough…..What we wait for is not more important than what happens to us while we are waiting.
When human beings shrink God, they offer prayer without faith, work without passion, service without joy, suffering without hope (learning perhaps?). It results in fear, retreat, loss of vision, and failure to persevere.
God reveals himself. So we reflect on what God has done and respond in worship. And our understanding of God grows.