Fantasy Land For Sale

For the sake of those you love, travel light.
For the sake of the God you serve, travel light.
For the sake of your own joy, travel light.
There are certain weights in life you simply cannot carry. Your Lord is asking you to set them down and trust Him.
Max Lucado ~ Traveling Light

It takes effort to have a deeper relationship with God. It doesn't magically happen. It must be fought for, pursued, and chased. My pastor encouraged us to pick a book and pick a time. My time is before bed. I want to get up in the morning, but it seems not to happen very often. I didn't know what to read. I prayed about it and Esther popped in my head, so I went with it. I read it last night. I knew the story, but God had something in specific for me last night.

For those who aren't familiar: Xerxes was the King of Persia. King Xerxes orders his queen to come to him so he could show off her beauty to his buddies and she didn't - so he replaced her. (It's kind of funny. The king and his buddies were worried that all the women in Persia would stop obeying their husbands so they had to do something drastic. Heaven forbid a woman doesn't jump when her man orders her.) He held a beauty contest and picked Esther. She was Jewish. Her people had been taken captive long ago, so she was in exile there. She didn't tell the king or his court that she was Jewish. Long story short - another guy in the court (Haman) gets mad at Mordecai (Esther's adopted father) and decided to kill all of the Jews in Persia. He gets the King to agree. Esther bravely goes before Xerxes to plead for the Jews lives to be spared, knowing that to go before the king without being asked means almost certain death. She finally succeeds with her plan and the Jews are saved.

Esther went to her King but didn't ask her request right away. Her discretion/self-control contrasted with Haman's recklessness. He built gallows to hang Mordecai even before asking the king. (Haman ended up hanging there himself.) I think God wanted me to learn more about self-control.

Max Lucado says the battle for self-control starts in the mind; it is a battle with our passions, thoughts and desires. He says it better than me:

We must learn to say no to those passions when they first enter our minds. Above all, we must pray for the inner strength of will necessary to curb our passions and desires. . . . Our own particular areas of vulnerability must be made the subject of earnest, beseeching prayer for God's grace to work in our wills. At the same time we must realize that the will is strengthened by obedience. The more we say no to sinful desires, the more we will be able to say no. But to experience this, we must persevere through many failures.

I have the tendency to focus on my desires too much. (Yeah, like that's news to anyone.) I have to stop it in my mind. The hardest part is that I like my fantasies. I like playing what if. I like getting everything I want in fantasy land. But when I finally come back to the real world, I'm very disappointed. I don't think I've begged the Lord for help in that area because I like my fantasy land. It's very hard to give up.

But in order to travel light, I have to get rid of my junk It's so hard to let go. I've got a white-knuckle grip. I foresee many failures. But I can do it.

For Sale - one highly used land of fantasy. It has a beautiful outside - everything you desire! For the adventurous sort, it is rugged and treacherous the farther back you go. Previous owner must leave for heart-health reasons. It comes fully furnished - previous owner is leaving everything behind.