PRIDE...

For some time now, God has been working in me.


It all beginning one Sunday morning at Coffey's Chapel UM Church, when my cousin and I were trying to recount all the seven deadly sins.  From that time on, I wondered where I was struggling.  There were a two that specifically "hit me between the eyes". Laziness and Pride. (I will write about laziness later).  For now you get PRIDE.  


I am not happy that I am making the statement that I am a PROUD person.  However I hate too, I must make that statement if I ever want to be true to myself.  I am wondering now though, if even by writing about my struggle with pride, if this simple act makes me prideful.  That is not my reason for writing though.  I have an assumption that I am not the only person with this problem.  


I like recognition.  I like people telling the "good job" I do.  I have worried about what people will say about me or even remember about when I am with my MAKER.  You know it is easy in my head to say that these are things that everyone struggles with and...maybe so.  However, I am beginning to realize something that about made me physically sick this morning...


You may not know that my upbringing was not easy.  I have experiences that most people do not know about, lived through my parents divorce, raised in a single-parent household, and have lived more of life without my father's presence than with it.  What I am realizing that I have been using these experiences to make me the martyr.  Not to use them against other people around, but in my relationship with God.  I have used them in a way of basically saying to God the reason I am this way is because of what has happened to me, I cannot change now this is just who I am.  


All the while, message of this is NOT who I created you to be, never stuck with me.  Until this morning that is.  I realized that while those were events I have had to live through and endure.  I cannot change how my story began but I can change how the story ends.  The ME, the REAL ME, is not those events.  Those events do not get to dictate who I am, WHOSE I am, what I can or cannot do, how I can or cannot change, or what I dream of or want out of life.  


I found a book title that I think I may read: I Can't See God...Because I'm in the Way.  That pretty much sums it up.  For a lot of my life, I have been in the way.  It is like a Solar Eclipse.  It was me that was between me and God.  I was getting a few rays  but I was missing out on the so much more because I was wrapped up in me; being the martyr.  I am foolish enough to think that I will change overnight but like all of life it is a journey.  It is my prayer that I will one learn from God to put me into perspective, the one God created.  I can no longer chose to let my experience be the end all of my life if not, I will be an aging man stuck in the mind and life of a teenager.  


GOD allow me to see you more fully.