Knee Deep

I suppose I should make my first real entry with the thought that brought this whole idea into action. I was driving through town on a warm summer day, windows down and Country on the radio, when the Zac Brown Band's single with Jimmy Buffett, "Knee Deep," was played. If you've never heard the song, it's quite catchy. The beat takes you to a beach while the words paint pictures of seagulls and ocean into your head. As the song plays out, Zac and Jimmy simply wish to wash their worries and troubles away on an island paradise.
As mush as I enjoy a summer beach song, it was the final words that stuck with me that day: "When you lose yourself, you find the key to paradise." The obvious intention is that forgetting your troubles, you find paradise, but in those words I see a profound truth in our relationship with God. In Matthew 16:24-25 Jesus speaks to his disciples and says "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it but whoever loses their life for me will find it."

  CS Lewis said it another way in Mere Christianity:    

"Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death        of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life...  Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in." 

In a quick paraphrase: When you lose yourself, you find the key to paradise. As Christians we are called to submit. Our plans, our hopes, our dreams, our likes and dislikes all need to be submitted to God. We need to align ourselves with him and his plans for our lives. 
This has always been one of my greatest struggles. I am a planner through and through. I think God chuckles at the irony of me being married to a man in the military, I know I do. My plans never work and are always changed at the last minute. Just last fall I was preparing to be stationed in Hawaii when Jason came home and told me we were moving to Louisiana instead. Then, with boxes packed the day before the movers were coming, I got a call from Jason telling me he was offered a slot in a class and he asked if we could stay another month. Yeah, my plans don't work out.
Yet, through these changes I have learned to trust God, rather than my own silly notions of the future. And when we do trust, God does not lead us astray. It isn't a sick game where he asks you to give up your hopes and dreams and replaces it with a miserable life. Instead, he gives you his plans for your life. And when you follow his plans, only then will you will be living the life you were made for. Don't get me wrong, you will certainly encounter times of misery, of struggle and pain, but with that will come the most powerful peace and reassurance.  Because in those times of frustration and confusion, you will know that by submitting to God, you are living out your destiny. In living for God rather than yourself, you will begin to be made new. And let me tell you, that newness will be complete in a paradise more incredible than you or Jimmy Buffett and the Zac Brown Band can imagine.