(continued...)

It would be another 7 years before I came to a more complete realization of what had happened when I prayed that prayer. Now, I'll admit that I didn't have the greatest interest in the things of the Lord right away. In fact I would have to confess that those first seven years of my Christian walk were, well… God evidently has a good deal of Patience. I didn't have much interest at all in learning about the Bible, about God. Maintaining my relationship with Christ was pretty low on my priorities, and I carried over some sinful habits from BC into AD. In two of his epistles, Paul tells the churches he's writing to to grow up in their relationship with God, so that they can stop being bottle fed spiritual things and be put onto solid food. (Uh… yes that is paraphrased a bit - 1 Cor. 3:2&3 & Hebrews 5:12 if you want his words.) These first years of mine, I was on formula and didn't care to move onto solid food.

After a loooong dating period, I asked Sandy to marry me. Little did I realize that one of Pastor Wilson's requirements in pre-marital counseling was that we attend three services a month together. I thought "Whoa! That's all but one a month! And I'm down at the University half of the weekends, and…" So pastor made me a deal. He said he would count a Sunday school class as a service, since he realized that I usually could only come home 2 weekends a month. We joined Ruth's class, and I loved it. I grew in my knowledge of the Lord a good bit from that class - mainly from all the class discussion. And I kept wanting to come back because I enjoyed the people so much. Church wasn't boring to me anymore!

So here I was, having grown in my relationship with God, and learned enough to know better and still had leftover sinful habits from before. I knew that I had to get rid of them, after all, that was what I told God I would do… so I tried and tried and couldn't break my habits. I asked God to try and help me beat them, and still could not. Why? you would think that if He wanted you to do something, He'd help you out… but not this time, because God had something else for me to learn - submission. I finally became so frustrated with it that I prayed and told God "fine! I can't do anything with all of this junk! It's all yours! I'm giving it all to you because I am at my end and it ain't getting me anywhere." It wasn't until I had submitted to God and given it all to Him that I was able to break the sinful habits that kept me from having a deeper relationship with Him.