Tunnel Vision

There’s soooo much I want to say right now! I want to sum up everything I have been learning but I’m afraid that’s impossible. This week we are learning about spiritual warfare and it is absolutely rocking my world! This man is simply amazing. He is teaching us about prophecy and the power of God within us, but I will save all of that for another blog entry because I’m still processing all of that information. This is my fourth week here and it seems like each week I am receiving deeper revelation of who God really is. I am learning that my relationship with Him is just that: MY relationship. I can’t live life with a religious view of God, what everyone else thinks a relationship with Him should look like. Religion says that it should be prayer every day, a daily devotion, and church on Sunday. Personal relationship says: all that other crap goes out the window and my relationship looks like whatever it is I feel God is leading me to do. All of those things are good, don’t get me wrong, but the presence of them in my life does not define my relationship with God. So maybe one day I pray for hours and maybe the next day I pray for a few minutes at a time throughout the day. Maybe one day I read the Bible for 20 minutes and the next day not at all and then the next day I spend hours with my face buried in His Word. Maybe this week I go to church on Wednesday and Sunday and then next week I hang out with friends on Wednesday instead of going to church…and then Sunday I don’t go to church either. Instead I go for a walk in the park and just spend time alone with God. Does it look unconventional? Yeah, a little…but it’s MY relationship with God and it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, especially the way religion makes it look. We are all running a race and we all have our own lane. I’ll look at my lane, my eyes fixed on God, and you look in your lane. We can’t compare our lanes because that’s when we’re going to stumble and start living in religion instead of relationship. We are each unique and individual and that’s exactly what our relationships with God should look like: unique and individual! God is big enough that He can actually have tunnel vision for each one of us individually, all at the same time! What I’m trying to say is this: we need to each live with tunnel vision for God too, not comparing ourselves to others around us but simply keeping focused on Him and living in our OWN relationship with Him…no matter how different it may look!