Walking with Him

Naomi just started consistently walking a couple of weeks ago. I love the determined look on her face as she focuses on taking each step. Sometimes at home she just walks "laps" up and down the hall, around and around the living room. Once I think she did this for 20 minutes straight. Just enjoying walking. Granted, she usually has to be holding something at the same time, but she is focused on the walking. That's a great picture of how I would like to live--simply walking with God and enjoying the journey.

I can get so discouraged when I look around for visible fruit of "my" investing in people. I start to think that I need to come up with the perfect words to speak to a person in a certain situation. That I need to make them see and understand how great it is to walk with God. That I need to see the fruit of my labors in order to make living and working here "worth it." How prideful to think that I have any power in myself to change human hearts, or to think my agenda is more important than God's! How prideful and demanding to want God to show me success in the way I define it, in order for me to be motivated to do what He has called me to do.

What makes everything worth it in this life is the privilege of getting to know Him more and more in every situation. I'm learning that the main thing He is calling me to do is to walk with Him! In the moments that I grasp this, it is very freeing. God is at work, and I can trust that. Only His Holy Spirit can change people. I praise Him that He's changing me! This motivates me to pray for people and to love them as God works through me.

God wants my life be an example of His goodness, and I should first of all ask Him what He wants to teach me and change in me, not how He wants me to solve everyone's problems. This continues to be very humbling for me. It's not the kind of teaching that I had in mind! To really let people into my life means I let them see not only the things He has done, the victories He has won, but also the sin that He is currently cleaning up. Being honest with people by admitting I don't have it all together, that I need God's grace moment by moment, that I struggle with sin--this is painfully humbling to my self--but I know that it glorifies God.

So what is God wanting me to teach people? Nothing...that is, in my own strength. He wants me to humbly walk with Him and allow Him to work in me and through me--for His purposes, His glory, His agenda--and for His people.