Life Journeys

Why am I here, and does it matter? God has crowned us frail creatures with glory and honor. But the crown was given, not earned, and the path to it runs through the valley. It’s exhausting to author our own worth, to keep trying harder instead of receiving. The glory we were made for is not the glory of the self-made man.

“Behold, all things have become new." It means: stop, look with intention, see what is actually in front of you. The categories by which you have known yourself - your history, shame, accumulated failures, your worst moments and your best ones - none of these are who you are anymore. Your exhausting effort to arrive at a worth that God has already freely given you has passed away.

To see Him clearly is to see what I am becoming, to live a life that matters. Primary faith—the faith from which all other faith flows—is simply this: believing in Jesus as the true source of everything my soul was made to have - the glory, esteem, purpose, and rest. It’s abiding in Jesus until what I ask becomes an extension of what He is asking.

We look at the last decade of the things we've broken and what’s broken us — and we use that wreckage to measure our identity. Before you were ever formed — your days were already written down. God said, “This one I’m making on purpose.” The validity of a life is not its perfection. It’s established by its Author.

The character of God defines us not by our origins, not by our biology, not by our worst days or our hardest diagnoses, not by what any man or any darkness has spoken over us - but by what He declared over us before the world began. Your life is not a mistake – no matter how hard it’s been.

On the far side of losing every self-generated source of strength, meaning, and identity — a quiet, stubborn "nevertheless" appears, carrying a life that is simply given rather than earned. What cannot be taken from you is more real than anything that can. The cross, however it arrives, opens the door to a life that requires nothing from this world to sustain it.

 

Covetousness runs deeper than mere desire — it is believing that what you have isn’t enough to be whole. Then busyness disguises the hunger for significance as sacrifice and thrives in the noise that misses God's presence. We've been in its storm for so long we've forgotten the calm. Contentment isn't found in abundance, but in God's supply, living in his potential, not ours.

Life Journey’s page: facebook.com/lifejourneys.us

God is not a restriction but a refuge — that He has offered Himself as your very life, your deepest peace, your truest identity. The heart behind the first commandment turns out to be the Father saying, I will be everything you have been searching for. The demand of the law has become the delight of a promise - something working beneath every trial.

Grace is not reactive to your performance. It is the initiative of a love that, having decided you are worth pursuing, declines to be talked out of it by your worst days. Our suffering is not evidence against us. You do not need to wait until the grief lifts, or the body cooperates, or the nation improves, or the darkness makes sense. The treasure is already in you.

Tribulation precedes restoration. Your suffering is not the ledger of your failure. It is the canvas upon which God is painting a masterpiece of the impossible. Condemnation takes the power of redemption out of God's hands and puts it in our own. It’s the idol of ego dressed in religious clothing. Don’t misidentify the scars of your cross as symbols of shame.