Anchored Confidence

I love walking intimately with the Father.  The day-in-day-out, ebb and flow of the relationship I share with my King gives my life its richest meaning and its most central priority.  It colors every single fiber of my existence.  It dictates every decision, every relationship, and every dream I have.  My relationship with the Trinity is my absolute favorite thing about the gift of this life I've been given.  There is absolutely nothing that holds more importance than this reciprocal kinship I share with my Creator.  One of my most treasured things about this life with God is discovering, exploring, and learning to lean into all that He is for me.  There are three things that I know with absolute certainty that He is for me.  My God is relentlessly kind toward me.  My God is unrelentingly joyful toward me, and my God is unfailingly generous toward me.  Throughout the entirety of my life, God has promised to prove these parts of His nature as my definition of who He is for me.  My confidence is anchored in the reality of these three aspects of His nature because He has proven them as my truth more times than I can count.  The history God and I have built have been focused on these three gorgeous parts of who He is. 

If you want to build a history with God, Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, you must have an anchored confidence in who He is for you.  One of my favorite things about God is that He adores questions.  I've learned that God does not do vague.  Specific questions thrill Him because questions are how He can show you through the gift of experience, a deeper and richer dependence on Him.  Plus, life is so much better when your walking with Someone who longs to share who He is through tangible events and circumstances that pop up during the walking out of everyday life.  Having an established and anchored confidence in who God is will allow you to press in to go deeper with Him.  He loves creating your personal anchored confidence.  This is one of the most important areas of spiritual formation that He invests in us as His sons and daughters.  Anchored confidence says that God will always come through.  It teaches us to expect Him to show up in huge ways.  This confidence mentors us in trust and rest in God.  This anchored confidence is what allows us to sleep in a storm.  He really wants us to have this part of our relationship and partnership with Him settled so that we may be able to flourish in our specific, specially-designed callings -- our assigned race.  Who is God for you.  He is waiting to show you.  Just ask.

B-R-A-V-E: Five Letters That Will Change Your Life

Brave.  A little five-letter word with huge implications.  As my friend, Christa Black Gifford, pointed out in her brilliant blog this week, this little word has become somewhat of a buzz word in the church in this season.  She also made the point that this word is seeming to become a theme in the earth and I agree with her.  Brave and I have had a sweet history the past several months.  It may only contain five letters, but, let me just say, it is a word that will keep you up at night.  I've had to wrestle with this word.  It is a word that is exhilarating, intimidating, impactful, white-knuckle scary, freeing, bold, all-in, and it is a word and a way of life that demands an anchored answer.  As I have walked in this word the last several months, I've learned that there is no gray area in bravery.  It definitely demands a level of commitment that is not concerned with what people think or say.  If you commit to bravery, there is no going back because, as I've found, it has a way of defining and changing and catapulting you forward into glorious albeit scary unknowns as well as unscouted but thrilling new territory in the physical realm and in the spiritual. 

Saying yes to bravery means depending on a big, kind, exciting, mysterious, ever-close God who is only waiting to take your hand and walk every single step of the way with you.  It means learning to take Him at His word as you speak the words, "Teach me what it means to walk into exceedingly abundantly far over and above all that we dare ask or think, infinitely beyond your highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes or dreams."   See what I mean about white-knuckle scary?!  That is a dangerous prayer.  To be real though, I want to speak and pray boldly knowing full well that God will deliver.  I've spent way too much of my life allowing fear to have the last word leaving me complacent and totally aligned with mediocrity.  I want to live passion.  I want to live bold.  I want to live brave.  I want to live undaunted.  I want to live kind.  I want to live as a woman who takes my identity as more than a conqueror seriously.  I want to live and lean into every part of who I am in Jesus.  I'm not interested in living rhetoric.  I want to relentlessly go after personal experience of Daddy God, King Jesus, and Holy Spirit.  Lets make a declaration with our lives to live BRAVE.