I think anyone living the human experience can agree that sometimes, life just happens. It’s just a fact of life, that one day you feel like you're flying, only to find the next day that you were actually falling. You were never flying at all. Any number of things could happen to you. You could crash your car. You could lose your job. You could find out your spouse is cheating. You could walk through grieving a loved one. 

Personally, I’ve recently found out someone very close to me– one of my best friends– has cancer. If you’ve ever been in the position where you’re a part of the support system for someone going through cancer, you’ll know there are many emotions attached. There’s grief that life is about to change radically as your loved one walks through treatment; trying to do everything you can and feeling like it’s not enough. There’s worry for the days ahead and the many outcomes that can happen. And at the same time, there’s an adamant and stubborn desire to remain strong for that person, wanting to be encouraging and steadfast and ready to dig your heels in and help that person fight.

This week, I met a new friend for dinner. While praying to bless the food, I said something along the lines of, “Lord, give us the courage to walk in your will.” When I finished, she asked me what I meant by asking for the courage to walk with the Lord. And I sort of paused, because it’s something I have been asking God a lot lately in my personal prayers. Have you ever been praying to God for something, and in your own mind the path from A to B is obvious? Have you ever mistaken that easy, obvious path as God’s will? Or maybe God closed the door on that route and left you feeling confused. Why would God tease us with something that seemed like an answer to prayer, only for it to pass right over us?

If you haven’t noticed by now, when Jesus teaches the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, He unveils them in such a way that they build upon one another. Blessed are the poor in spirit. That applies to any believer in God, where at the point of salvation, they realize they are so spiritually bankrupt that they could never save themselves. Thus, they are in need of Jesus to save them and pay that debt. Blessed are those who mourn. In other words, blessed are those who see their sin and realize how that sin has grieved God, and grieve over it themselves. They deeply understand just how badly their sin has separated them from the presence of God and find themselves in sorrow over how they’ve wronged God, and yet they find comfort from the Lord in that those sins are forgiven. And blessed are the meek?

Ever been on a long road trip with a baby? I have now, and if you take a look at this past weekend, you might say I took several. We had to take a trip to Connecticut this weekend as a family– yes, including our six week old, Piper, and Archie, our dog. In order to try and make the journey easier, we planned to make several stops along the way that would let us stop and rest on our way to where we had to be and then traveling back home.

How do we follow Jesus? Recently, I’ve come to learn that the answers are so simple: to follow Jesus, we must look at him and remain behind Him. These lessons are thanks to the endlessly cool Eric Gilmore, who I had the unique opportunity to spend a Saturday with at a School of His Presence conference. It seems elementary, but I’m starting to learn that we tend to try and complicate the simple truths of God’s beautiful gospel. At the end of the day, our heady qualifications and lofty, theological thoughts are not the prerequisites to living a life submitted to Christ.