Winning!!! (Part One – Needs Met)

“You’ll know you’re winning when you are no longer thinking about yourself.” There it was, a sparkling result, indeed synthesis of the many things I had been talking over with my “Papa.” I have found my weekly trips to visit my mother have provided me with a rich opportunity for communion with my God of endless solutions. And today was no exception. Simply summarized by one compelling sentence. “You’ll know you’re winning when you are no longer thinking about yourself.” When you live your life functioning as your own sufficiency, you are living a difficult life. You have neither the power, the authority or even the wherewithal to get the job done. Yet that is how most people live. They spend their preciously short lives chasing after what they need, supplied entirely by their own efforts, their own abilities, their own grind. As both the beginning and end of their provision, it requires almost perpetual striving to achieve, to get, to increase and to never be able to actually rest. It’s all work and no play. It is the persistent need to do something. It is the inability to slow down or even stop to appreciate what is. It is life out of order and with that a hefty price is extracted. Conversely, when you learn how to let God be your sufficiency, the struggle ends. Not the challenges of course, but the struggle to figure it all out for yourself. The exhausting, endless struggle that accompanies trying to accomplish a job that was never yours to begin with. You learned life without God, not life with God. God promised to supply everything you will ever need.  And let me offer from firsthand experience, what He supplies is always, always better than anything I could have figured out on my own. When we get the proper order straight, life becomes a joy. You start living and appreciating your life as your job and He provides everything you will ever need to have your needs abundantly met as His job. Outside of that noisy din and clamor of all the masses trying to get their own needs met lies God’s solution, an opportunity, a “chance meeting,” a sudden discovery, a great blessing that meets that particular need and in like fashion every other need. Every need. Relationship needs, health needs, happiness needs, broken hearts and every other thing you could ever need to live your best life now. When that day comes you will know at last that God has become your sufficiency in every conceivable way. Your dependence will no longer be on yourself and your limited, finite abilities. It will gloriously be on Him and His infinite ability and power. Then you can finally let all of that life robbing energy go. You won’t have to be the Alpha and the Omega anymore. You can tap into your Papa for your solutions and as such will no longer have to spend most of your life thinking about yourself. “You’ll know you’re winning when you are no longer thinking about yourself.”

God began this wonderful concept of human beings with the idea that His precious man would be forever connected to Him. Adam began his life with God. God was Adam’s sufficiency. Adam didn’t have to figure life out. God explained it to him. But as the story goes, man lost that connection and as time went on knew less and less about God. Even to this day many people equate a life with God as one of denial and discipline and a constant monitoring for potential sins, not as a Father seeking to provide for and love His children. God invented the concept of you so that He could be a Father to His children (you). Your life purpose and mission is first and foremost to find Him, the source of all life; the source of your life. He is not hiding from you. Then in finding Him learning to let Him do for you what He promised He would do. Let Him be your sufficiency in full. “You’ll know you’re winning when you are no longer thinking about yourself.”

The reason we spend so much time thinking about ourselves is because we learned (the hard way) that once we became adults, life was ours to figure out. In not knowing otherwise we accepted the job. But, if we are honest, we learned also that we suck at it. The job, that job is way bigger than we are. Alone we aren’t enough to handle the capacity. A million people combined do not have the capacity to get the job done. Only God can get the job done because it is His job and He is really, really good at it. God owns a realm that nothing else can own called the future. He sees what is ahead. He knows what’s coming. He already provided everything you will ever need before you were even conceived. And when you trust Him to be your sufficiency, He guards your future. Did you catch that? You no longer have to live your life in perpetual anxiety about what is going to happen in your future! You can let it go and live now. Appreciate now. Revel in the blessings in your life right now. Love your life right now. That’s the point, the whole point. Your life was never intended to be an endless ride on the struggle bus. Life is not hard. Life without God is hard. When you let Him do His job while you content yourself with your job, you will feel the pressure lift. The burden gets lighter and lighter. You can rest like children rest knowing their parents are taking care of them. Then you don’t have to live your life consumed with yourself; with what you do not have that you need or how you are going to figure it all out. You can let it go trusting your Papa to do what He promised. He is God and He is your solution to everything that ever hurt you and the provision of everything you could ever need. And how can you tell if you are living the fullness of what He promised? How can you tell if you are winning at the serious game of life? “You’ll know you’re winning when you are no longer thinking about yourself.”

Just some good thoughts…