Always getting ahead

One of my biggest faults is that I am always trying to get ahead of God. He gives me a vision or a direction, and I run with it! However, many times, I run with it on my time table with my plan...and no, that isn't working too well for me!

As I walk this crazy life trying to figure out how to determine God's will and timing instead of my own, I picked up a book by Stormie OMartian called Just Enough Light fr the Step I'm On. It has been a really good book. I mentioned it in the post about the peace with Ava's medical tests. If you have read any of Stormie's writing, you know she is pretty blunt! She doesn't really sugar coat anything. There are a few things that I don't know that I agree with on a theological level...or maybe just more of a disagreement on where she places emphasis, but she has some really good and amazing points! Here are a few that have really spoken to me!

• "The wilderness is where God takes us when He wants to get Egypt out f our hearts. He wants t separate us from all that we crave, s that all we crave is Him. Just as God wanted to get the taste of Egypt out of the Israelites' mouths, He wants to get the lust fr certain comforts our of our appetites, too. It's not that He doesn't want us to ever be comfortable. It's just that He doesn't want us to depend on the comfortable. He wants us to depend on Him. He doesn't want us to love the comforts more than we love Him. When God aims us in a new direction, we have to let go of what we've known, be willing to embrace the unfamiliar, and trust that He will sustain us on the journey."
• "God wants us to surrender our dreams because we can't be led by Him if we are chasing after a dream of our own making....The dream has to be realized His way."
• "Where there is no vision, the people parish" Prov 29:18 - reminds me of the general public of Liberia! We've got to change that!
• From the chapter, "Expecting a Call": "I've seen many people who were too busy, too drugged out, too tired, to preoccupied, or to in pursuit of riches and fame to hear God calling them. Others were afraid they might be called to insignificance and s they didn't want to know about it. I've known others still who clearly heard the call of God and ran away from it. The direct line from heaven was ringing and they turned up the volume on their lives so they wouldn't have to hear Gd and answer. I've also known people with such a low opinion of themselves that they didn't believe God had them destined for anything great. So when the call came, they thought it must be fr somebody else and didn't respond.
• "The only reason it appears that some people are "more called" by God then others is that they were expecting the call and answered it."

Pretty powerful stuff if I can just apply it! :)