I hadn’t really been taking this Lenten journey seriously until last week when God brought me to my knees and got me to admit that I can do nothing without God. To surrender myself totally to God’s will and not mine. Would I be able to say yes to God?

You see, I have always approached God with such expectation of God’s grace and mercy and steadfast love for me – a God that never fails me. Going deep into introspection with God and discerning what God’s will is for my life are almost an afterthought. For isn’t anything and everything I do part of God’s greater plan? Even the parts I am not so proud of, even the wrong turns and poor decisions – weren’t they just part of my ordered steps toward salvation?

I discovered this past week that God wants MORE from me – what that entails is coming with clarity and force and so I await, with anticipation, God’s orders. I am in some ways terrified while at the same time exhilarated. Would God ask me to leave everything I know and go into the unknown without a plan of my own [which not incidentally is how I have operated for most of life]? Could I possibly fully operate in the Holy Spirit and completely surrender? Could I enter a space that looks, with my human eyes, to be impossible – a space where only God could make a reality?

At times I have felt like I was on the very cusp of it – that moment when I knew God was with me, yes little old me, that I was fully and totally in sync with God through the Spirit. I said I have often felt on the cusp of it. But I always fall short. Never able to shift to the other side of total surrender and never allowing myself to be totally filled with the Spirit of God. How I long to reach the other side. What would that be like? I can only imagine.

So this is my prayer, oh Lord. Let your Spirit fall fully and freshly upon me like never before. Open my heart, my mind, my spirit, my whole being to experience your presence, your reign over my life, with me completely out of the way. I await you, God, in terror and anticipation, for a new thing to be done in and with me.