Make no mistake about it: God has the power to change our lives in ways we cannot imagine. But we have to clear His way by getting out of it.

The choice we make is a bigger one than we might realize. It's not simply deciding we want Him to clean up a particular area of our lives or fix a specific problem. It's a choice to give Him total control.

TOTAL. Control.

Total control means He decides where to start. He may not start with the sin we wanted Him to help us change, or with the struggle we wanted Him to help us overcome. He has the power to do much more in our lives than we could ever think to ask Him, and He isn't willing to settle for our best. He wants to give us HIS best. And He's not much for negotiating.

The question isn't if He can change our lives, but if we believe His best is better than ours.

When I was a kid, my mom, bless her, was always willing to give me an explanation. She never liked to use "because I said so" to end a debate.

Raising three of me, I don't have that option. I just don't have the time to explain myself every time.

Being a Christian doesn't entitle us to understanding or explanations from God for every circumstance. On the contrary, being a Christian means we should be willing to follow and trust Him, simply because He said so.

Confidence has always come easy for me. Humility, not so much. Trying to learn how to mix both has felt like mixing oil and water.

But if I make a list of everything I've done well without God, and another of list of everything God can't do without me, the lists are amazingly similar.

I've treated humility as if it were ignoring my gifts. But that's not humility, that's just ungrateful. Humility should go hand in hand with confidence, as long as your confidence is in the One who gave the blessing, rather than the one who received it.

And it should also come with the confidence that He gave it for a reason and will be faithful to use it the way He intended.

Not all of our blessings from God come in the package that we wanted. Sometimes they feel like that trick you might have seen at Christmas, where you get a big box and open it to find a smaller box, and repeat until you finally get a very small gift in the end, but it's the best present.

A lot of blessings come from things not going the way we hoped, or maybe even from a disaster or heartbreak. I don't know why God does it this way. I have plenty of theories, but His ways are higher than our ways. And that's really all that matters.

The world is full of things to distract us. People, circumstances, health, even blessings often come between us and our relationship with the Lord. And that's just in the present. One of our favorite pastimes is imagining what might come our way in the future. We are distracted by things that haven't even happened and may never happen. What's the point?

If you nail down that God can and will do what is right, all that is left is to trust Him and enjoy His love and grace while you wait to see what He does next.

I've always read Psalm 51:6 and thought it meant God wants us to be honest with Him. And maybe that is what it means. But I read the second half of the verse this week and saw something I hadn't thought of before: "....and in the hidden part You will make me know wisdom."

Sometimes the hard part is being honest with yourself. I don't have a hard time telling God what I think is the truth. I have a hard time knowing if what I am telling Him really is the truth.

I've never told God anything He didn't already know. But He's told me a LOT that I didn't know. Maybe this verse is as much about letting God be honest with us as it is about us being honest with Him.

It's easy to get a little motion sick along the twists and turns of life. But God is unshakable. His love, grace and faithfulness to His children doesn't fluctuate with circumstances of the day. And that's what He wants for us.

While we cannot control our circumstances, the fallen world we live in, or even our own sinful nature entirely, we can trust it all to Him and grow to share more of His nature, including the gift to be unshaken by the day to day ebb and flow of life.

One of the hardest parts things to do as a Christian is aligning our priorities with our beliefs. We believe Jesus is the most important thing. We believe He knows what's best and will always do what is best.

But we like to add two more words to that sentence, and they wreck the entire thing: "for me".

What's best "for me" may not be what's best for Jesus. And how we respond when those don't line up shows who really comes first in our lives.