God is Good

Lowell and I came home yesterday from our Annual Marriage Immunity Booster Conference. (It's actually Hume Lake's Fall Couples Conference #1, but my name for it is so much more descriptive, don't you think?) It did rain most of Saturday afternoon, which meant we didn't get to shoot shotguns or go on the GPS Adventure (follow GPS coordinates to get to the prize) and we skipped the rainy extreme Bocce tournament b/c taking a nap was just a lot more enticing. But the most important pieces were all there... A really good speaker (I'll talk more about him in a minute), awesome worship, lots and lots of good food and meals shared with a lot of neat couples we'd never met before and time for Lowell and I to be together and learning and thinking about our marriage. It might not be a cheap weekend, but we've determined that our marriage is absolutely worth investing in and this is a great place for that to happen. Unfortunately, I don't have any great pictures to show you b/c we left our camera at home and Lowell's phone wouldn't work. Oh well. The speaker was Pete McKenzie from Southern California and he was so good. Our favorite quote from his sessions was this: "Life is difficult. But it's more difficult if you're stupid." Nice, huh??? But the thing he said that hit me the hardest was that we have to choose between the path to Pleasing God and the path to Trusting God. I wasn't sure where he was going with that at first, because I've always tried to do both. But he explained that STRIVING to PLEASE God depends on our own efforts and focuses on our failures and trying to fix our sin and do everything right. But TRUSTING God starts with humility and repentance and lets God do the work of changing us and changing those around us. It says "I'm standing with God and my sin is before me and we're working on it together" instead of "I'm working on it..." He also mentioned that to "Be Still" means to "Cease Striving" which means so much to me especially since I wrote a song back in July called "Be Still". So, I'm going to be learning for a while about how to trust God without the striving. Striving to be better and do everything right is as natural to me as breathing so it's going to be a hard habit to break, but I'm trusting God to do it because I know I can't do it on my own. And I can trust Him. God is good and life is good when I'm walking with and waiting on God. Even when it's difficult.