One year ago I made a promise to myself that I would write a single entry in this very blog each day for the next 365 days. I’m not actually sure though if I really believed I could do it when I made that promise to myself. You see my real truth is that I usually failed to keep any promises I made to myself throughout most of my entire life. But something has radically changed within me over the past year and a half that has helped me to reach this goal and fulfill that promise I made a year ago. What is it? One word…God.
If I took a snapshot of my life two years ago today, there is only one real difference between the me then and the me now. And that’s the level of how much I was living in self-sufficiency versus God-sufficiency.
The definition I like to use that best describes the self-sufficiency I lived with for years and years is “having extreme confidence in one’s own resources or powers”. This was totally me for way too long where I over utilized the only things I thought I had to offer in this world such as money, sex, and an extreme power of persuasion. While I survived doing this for over two decades, I wasn’t ever truly happy and I frequently made promises to myself to try to change that, but never kept to any of them.
All of that changed though in the beginning of 2012 when I parted ways with the last people I had in my life who I allowed to keep me in those places of living more in self-sufficiency. At first, it was incredibly fearful when I let them go, but as time moved forward, I became more God-sufficient and began to see my spiritual strength grow from within. About a year later, several people had suggested I create a blog and start doing a daily reflection of my life’s spiritual experiences. By that point, it had been over six years since I had done any writing with regularity, but somehow having a lot more God-sufficiency gave me enough strength and courage to pursue it. And now it’s been 365 straight days of me doing this very exercise.
I believe all of us in this world are capable of making promises to ourselves and actually keeping to them, but it takes something much greater than our own self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency can only get us so far, but having more God-sufficiency can lead us to having an everlasting supply of energy to accomplish any task we set forth for ourselves. I’m so grateful to have made it to this writing milestone and now I know I have the spiritual strength within today, to keep any promise I make for myself.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson