If that’s the case then you need to just be you…who He created you to be.

Don’t try to be a copy of another…you will never be the best they can be.

Just be all you can be.

Sometimes we may feel all alone. That God is not with us. That He’s not listening. That He’s turned his back on us. We wrestle with our thoughts…with the enemy. We think we it’s all over.

BUT…and i like that “but” in verse 5….we must keeping moving forward. Keep trusting in those times. Keep leaning into Him. Keep making Him bigger than the situation we are in.

Psalm 13

1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,

4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

5 But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.

6 I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me.

What a subtle reminder for us to keep on trusting Him…no matter what!!!!!

We all do sometimes. We go down a path…make choices…get into stuff we shouldn’t and find ourselves on a road we no longer want to be on.

Unfortunately, with all that past behind us we now let it define who we are and think we can’t start over. We hope we could just have a new beginning.

2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it!” You can have a new start. There is a new beginning for you.

You ask questions like, “Why me?” or “What did I do wrong?” And there you sit…feeling as if darkness is all around.

And you ponder…”why do bad things happen to good people?”

I can’t totally answer that question. I know it seems it shouldn’t work that way. But it happens. And how are you going to handle it when it does?

All I can tell you is that you need to get up. When you feel you are sitting in darkness…God will be your light.

Micah 7:8 Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the LORD will be my light. (NIV)

When you feel like you are down…get up!!! God is your light. He is still there and you just have to keep having faith.

If life were easy and we could walk right threw it…it wouldn’t require faith.

Faith is believing and seeing even when you can’t.

So if life has rocked you…rise up….say to that mountain, “get out of my way!”

Don’t make it overwhelming . Take it one step at a time.

It’s not about getting to where you need to be in one step. In fact that’s pretty hard to do. What it is about is making progress in the direction you know you should be at.

One step at a time.

Step by step. Reach one step…got it…take the next.

Soon you’ll realize you are a lot further down the road than you though you were.

How is taking the next step hard for you?

It may not be that easy…but it does have to start somewhere and that is with how we think. We define ourselves by how we think we are. And then that lead to what we say about ourselves.

Watch yourself over the next week. What do you think about? Does it define you? Is it how you really think you are?

Start to change that today.

CHANGE your thinking….CHANGE your you.

Choices are a pain aren’t they. Some are easy. But some have lasting consequences. Some can bring you closer to the victory of life and some can have you even further from it.

BUT…you might be thinking, “I’ve made some bad ones…how can I go back? It has to be over for me.”

NO IT’S NOT.

The rest of you life begins with your next choice.  That doesn’t mean that it will be easy. Some choices have long lasting consequences.

To begin to change the rest of your life you have to begin to adjust you choices to put you in the right direction AND keep going forward. It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over!!!!

Do you feel you past the point of no return?

I push everyone and everything back in my life. I don’t let anyone in.

The smile on the outside is a cheap facade to the pain I have stored up on the inside.

I want to change. I need to change. But it’s so much easier to hold on to the pain. To let it drive all I do. To hold people at arms length with statements like, “I’m good.”

And while everyone walks by I still hurt. I still have the pain that I hold like a security blanket. It’s who I really am.

NO IT’S NOT….let’s slam the breaks on for a moment.

We are who we let ourselves be defined as. We don’t have to hold on to the pain. We don’t have to let it determine who we are. It doesn’t have to rule our lives. We can stop that.

You know you need to let it go, but it is easier to hold on.

Today needs to be the next step in the new who you need to be.

Are you holding back?

Think about it…I’m sitting here writing this post on my iPhone and when I publish it, it will instantly hit twitter, then Facebook and be accessible to thousands of people.

What I’m saying is that times and things change. What hasn’t changed is that we are driven by connection. Only the methods of connecting have changed.

Church has to be willing to change as well. It won’t change our message. Our message is sacred and timeless, but our methods are changeable and must adapt.

Each year thousands of churches close there doors. Possible because many have never “picked up their iPhone”. They have never changed. Let your methods adapt hold on to the message. Rethink, take a risk.

I can only imagine 10 years from now where technology will take us. We need to embrace that we are really the only ones holding back what God may want to do through us.

***Disclaimer*** We are not in thoughts about starting a baf campus in Africa. But if our interns keep messing around we may just ship them there to start one.