A week ago I wrote about a recent experience - a necessary experiment of faith that I've been doing.
When the experiment began, I was crawling along under a burden of many very negative attitudes and feelings. Try as I might, I could not find the power to overcome them on my own.
But then the words from an old Amy Grant song from the 1980s popped into my head, and I started to see a light at the end of that proverbial tunnel.
"Lord, help me raise my hands so You can lift me up!"
I remembered that trying hard (even trying really hard) to overcome evil (even evil inside my own head) will not always work. Sometimes I need help to overcome it. (And sometimes I need help to even ask for help!)
So I prayed those words.
And the experiment began.
Soon after that prayer, the Lord gave me a little exercise - a statement of faith with which to come against the negatives.
As I reported in the last post, that statement went "Lord, I choose to believe that..."
I am very happy to report that recently I've been enabled to modify my statement a bit. Instead of "I choose to believe that" I find "I believe that" to be much more natural and true.
Only one word was removed, but the difference is huge.
By God's grace, my moment-by-moment faith has begun to experience a resurrection of sorts, and it feels good to believe without having to try so hard.
But being human in a sinful world I know that sometime probably soon I'll have to go back to choosing.
But that's okay, because now I understand more than ever that sometimes faith is an act of will and nothing more.
And that's okay too.
