Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving is a special one for me. After about 12 years of wondering, I’m finally back where I belong. The last 12 years of my life have been a real trial. The highs and lows were some of the most extreme I’ve ever experienced.  God stretched me, put me in the fires, rolled me in the dirt, and like the ant on the hill, put me under the magnified glass until I started smoking. All of His trials and testing’s left me feeling abounded by Him. At one point I even questioned His existence. All of this culminated in December 2009 when my family and I had to sell everything we owned, I mean everything. We left in our car with only our clothes and important papers. Thanks to some loving family members who opened up their home to us, we were able to move back from the place we had left 12 years earlier. I had a job waiting for me when we arrived, so after a couple of months we were able to get our own place.

The point I want to get to is, everything we went through was part of Gods plan. He had to bring us to a place of total submission. Causing us to depend on Him for everything, even where our next meal was going to come from. Looking back now, I would not change one thing. Everything we went through, God bringing us to that point of total dependence on Him has made me the man that I have longed to be. A servant of the Most High God.

So this Thanksgiving is truly my best one ever. Another one of the things I’m so thankful for is, after almost a year of praying and waiting on the Lord, the job that I have been praying for came through. You see the job that I did have was 50 miles away. The hours at work, the drive times, all left me drained at the end of the day. So I had little energy to focus on the ministry we started (www.anchorholdsministries.org). Starting this Monday I will be working for Apple Inc, and the best part is I’ll be working from home. Now I will have so much more time to focus on our ministry, thank you Lord God. I’m also so very thankful to be back home near family again. I’m thankful for our car and that it’s still running. We have just one car, and we’ve put a boat load of miles on it. Every day the car starts up and gets us where we need to be… Thank you Lord!

This last year has been an amazing one, and I’m so grateful that God put us through everything He did. I could not have become a man that He can use if were not for the trials we endured.

I encourage you; if you’re going through some tough times, hang in there. Remember, God is in control; He loves you and wants only the best for you. The sooner you let go of self, the better.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. May God bless and keep you always,
Tim

Pride

Pride
Spiritual cancer

It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began… Pride always means enmity… it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurable superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that, and therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison… you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and of course, as long as your looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God.

C.S. Lewis