Burn me up.

I realized I was doing it again. I was pushing. I was trying to make things happen, trying to garner attention, telling myself that if other people noticed me and wanted to be around me, I would feel better. I would be on top again, an I-n-d-e-p-e-n-d-e-n-t woman, brushin' the dust off my shoulders.
Wrong-o. When I try to do things on my own strength, I usually end up letting the haters hate, rather than walking by them with my head held high. The key to my failure is "my own strength". I can't do things on my own strength, no one can. It amazes me that I continually fail spectacularly at this concept, constantly giving God my problems, then picking them back up, saying "Well, God, I just deal with them since they aren't really important enough for You to deal with."
Gentle readers, allow me to share a few of the concepts I have been dwelling on lately.
First, the future. Thinking about the future has always produced mixed feelings, with the far future bright and full of wonder, and the near future full of toil. Oh, Kaleigh girl. You serve a God much bigger than such an attitude:
"But I said, 'I have labored in vain; I have spent all my strength for nothing at all. Yet what is due me is in the Lord's hand, and my reward is with my God.'" Isaiah 49:4
I'm not sure about you, but that is a relief. I labor and work and exert myself and much of the time I come up empty. Despite that, it is not fruitless. My reward is with God. He sees all my struggle, however feeble, but He doesn't disregard it.
"As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice, the Almighty, who has made my life bitter, as long as I have life within me, the breath of God in my nostrils, my lips will not say anything wicked, and my tongue will not utter lies." Job 27:2-4

to be continued...