This week some real issues surfaced within me that I would like to share. On Thursday my community activation group put on a block party for our community, we had a free food, face painting, and entertainment on a portable stage, rappers and music and the like. I was in charge of MCing and organizing the entertainment and it was stressful. Even though it was going great the whole time and people were enjoying themselves and getting healed (One girl was using crutches and all the pain left her leg 7/10 to 0/10 pain!) and we were making friends with community members I was really uptight the whole time. Afterward I was exhausted because of all the personal effort I put in to make it all work, even though I did not need to. This was the same feeling I had about a month ago while I was leading a meeting for my international transformation group, delegating responsibilities and such. Even though everything was going incredibly well the whole time I was stressing out like nobody's business! Then, the most recent proof that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with, I was talking with one of my good friends last night about our dreams for the future, I started talking about what I saw myself doing in the coming years (a subject for another blog entry, perhaps several other blog entries) and, as I did, I felt this tension begin to take hold of my body. Instead of drawing life out of thinking about my dreams I began to feel heavy and burdened.
The constant in these examples and in the countless other times I can think of when I felt like this is this one vital thing: Responsibility. Every time I have been put in a position where the success or failure of something is based upon my actions I have taken on more than my fair share of stress.
After my conversation with my friend last night I began to realize that this was something that had to be dealt with, I fully intend on being in positions of incredible authority and responsibility in the future and it would not do to have an inordinate amount of stress all the time. I prayed about it and God graciously talked me through it all. Behind the feeling of stress there has always been fear, that emotion that can be so crippling and keeps us from our dreams. In this case it was the fear of failure, what would happen is I would get afraid that I would mess everything up and my automatic reaction would be to tighten up and try to exert my control over the situation, the logic being that if I try really hard it will be more likely to succeed. All of this is mostly subconscious of course. But emotions are never the root issue, they are always a symptom, emotions do not cause themselves they exist as reactions. So, I asked God what the root of these fear feelings were and He led me to read Paul's epistle to the Galatians. For those of you who do not know, Galatians is all about the issue of "Law vs Grace" the new covenant, the agreement made with God since Jesus, says that the only way we get to be righteous is by faith, believe and receive and you got it, whilst the old covenant, the previous agreement that God had made with the Jews, said that the only way to be righteous was by following a whole bunch of rules. The Galatians were trying to mix the covenants, which Paul vehemently rebuked them for. When I finished reading I realized that the issue I was having was that I was thinking that my success or failure was based upon my actions. But that is not what the Bible says at all. God tells us again and again that our success is entirely based upon Jesus' actions. This is a big deal, the idea that I have to do a bunch of stuff to be accepted is an idea quite ingrained in my head, it is going to be a process to overcome it. But I believe that I will and that it will change my life. I am incredibly excited to see what God is going to do and I know it is all going to work out wonderfully-
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