The weight of the future is increasing. I feel heavy and consumed with things that are not of God.
I have less than a month before I depart from everything that I know, to experience everything that I do not know. I am letting the preparation consume me.
I am concerned with how I am going to see and talk with everyone before I leave. I feel the days slipping away. I hate this, but the past several days I have been so focused on the packing and gathering of materials. My flesh and what I have learned tells me that I need to be perfectly prepared and that I need to have the best “stuff”.
I find myself with the mind of a consumer – the very thing I am so
eager to leave behind. My personality encourages me to spend hours comparing and researching and trying to make sure everything is just right.
That is time taken from prayer and God and friends.
Bottom line is that I am trying to be in control.
I am not trusting God. Control has always been an issue for me. It is the same struggle, but it just finds new ways of manifesting itself.
It is unbelievable to me how Satan can take good things and distort and twist and mangle them. Something good can become a struggle when it is looked at it with worldly eyes. The World Race is outstanding, but the enemy has found a way to use it
‘s preparation to lead me away from Christ.
That makes me so angry!! I want to spend this time in prayer
; with family and friends
; reading – not designing a system of how things will fit in my pack! I am done with packing, I am ready to rest in Christ.
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Please pray for me as I prepare.
Pray that I would not be consumed with these things.
Pray that I would be focused on Christ and that I would take advantage of the time with family and friends.
I love Paul’s words. They resonate so true with me –
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.
Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work:
When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.
For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
