Gutsy Faith - We Were Broken

This week in our Gutsy Faith discussion group, several of us were really broken. It was just an amazing time. In our discussions over the past two sessions we've walked away with several "assignments." After our first week we all agreed to find 15 minutes in our days and redeem that time by reading and meditating on the Psalms. Myself, I spent most of that time meditating on Psalms 90-100. Good stuff. Go check it out. Last week we chose to carve out 15 minutes of time in prayer. What we found was that even 15 minutes of time each day was difficult. Many of us were broken about the idea that it was such a difficult thing to do. Just 15 minutes a day, and many of us failed, to include myself.



I'll withold this person's name because this message was sent to me in confidence, but one of our group wrote an e-mail to me and had this to say regarding the 15 minutes of time:



"...I haven't been doing the more personal, reading of the psalms and praying 15 minutes each day...But I know it goes the same, just keep trying, I know the Lord knows my heart and I am trying, just need to keep at it. I just felt real convicted for not being able to give the Lord 15 minutes each day of "my" time. It's just frustrating to me that I won't do that, that’s my struggle. But I'm pluggin away..."



Don't we all struggle with that? There is a shame issue that we feel
when we can't give God even 15 minutes of our time. Wow! Why is it so difficult? Why is it we allow the world to crowd out God, when God should be our everything?


Here's my questions for you:

• How do you find time to be with God?


• How do you find time to focus on Him and what He wants to say to you?


• What do you do to carve out time for God?

If you want to pray for me, or our group, here's what I want you to pray: "God, give Jeff and the Gutsy
Faith group the ability to find at least 15 minutes each day to find solitude with you."



That's what we need.



That's what we all need.

For those of you following our Gutsy Faith Small Group experiment, we met on Tuesday of this week for the second time. Suffice it to say that our second week in Gutsy Faith got better than the first week, as one might expect. Unfortunately, we had to cut our discussions short due to time constraints of the work day. Some just had to get back to work. But this week really started opening up the can of worms and our young leaders seemed hungry to rip the can open and let the worms go where they may (sorry for the bad metaphor, but it was the best I could do after a long week of sleep deprivation – a long story – another blog for later this week, maybe).

The overall synopses of this week's chapters centered around the fact that God still calls his people to do miraculous things. When we ask Him for insight into where He's taking us, He says He will give it to us. When He does so, if we pray for those things to be achieved, believing in faith, we can be assured that they will be accomplished. The key lies in the strength and level of intimacy we share with God in our prayer lives.

Prayer really is the key to everything. I was really challenged this week about that fact. God really hammered me about it. To be blatantly honest, getting to this point in the release of this book has been a rough road for me and my wife. When I was working on the book last year was probably one of the busiest times of my life. It was just before a major event in Indianapolis that our company was supporting. In order to get the book done by my deadline, I took a week away from work to go write it at my parent’s house in Georgia. While the writing went well, I came back to a flurry of activities that I had hoped would slow down after the major Indianapolis event concluded. Little did I know how wrong my hopes were.

Life for us has not slowed down at all. In fact, it's gotten even more hectic. Without going into all the details (which would be another book entirely), our family's life went through major changes that could not have been anticipated. While many of these changes have been for the good overall, it has meant that everyday life have been far more busy. The long and short of it is that on any given day I wake up at 4:30 AM in order to go to the gym before work and my days don't usually end until 11:00 PM. The days are usually packed. Which means my prayer time, while it hasn't gone away, is a bit less than it was a year ago.

Sherry, one of the ladies in the group, made the comment this week that when life gets hard, the ability to pray seems to be easier. It's like we realize that we really need God during those hard times so we find ourselves praying more. It's in the calm times when the prayer time seems difficult. By and large that's a very true statement. However, I'd like to add to that comment. Business can be its own form of difficulty. It's not necessarily hard, but it can be difficult. Prolonged busyness can have an opposite effect to one's prayer life than the standard hard times. Busyness can demolish one's prayer life.

I've found that because of my lessened prayer life,
I've been less intimate with God than I have been in the
past. I miss my intimacy with the Father. I'm desperate for that level of intimacy again. OK, so crucify me if you want for just being honest. I've promised those in our group that I'd be as open and honest in my blogging as I've asked them to be in theirs. I won't back down from that promise. So, if I have heard one thing from God this week it is this: I must reclaim the depth of time I spend with God. He's calling me to do so.