Honestly, when I began to write this post, I wanted to vent. I wanted to tell everyone in an indirect way about how I feel I've been wronged. I wanted to subtly point out the error in someone else's ways. What I really wanted to do, though, is point at a speck in someone else's eye rather than acknowledging the plank in my own. I was immediately convicted. Instead of following through with typing out a scathing, satirical list of what I don't like about x, y and z, I did something completely unusual. I prayed that I would stop being so selfish and God would enable me to constantly understand that none of what I do or experience is about me, but that it is about God's Kingdom and the lost who need to come through its gates.
The way God convicts me of sin at the outset of temptation amazes me. It also encourages me because it is clear evidence of God's restoring work in my life.
If I think "life isn't fair" because I have to sit in traffic for three hours (not anymore since I left the DC area) or if I feel used, beat up or hurt by a friend, coworker or family member, God reminds me that there are people in underground churches across this world that would give anything to sit in traffic in the United States - while they are driving to church, which meets in a building everyone can find, the government knows about, and no one gets killed in.
