Working with What's in Front.

"And when the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified and said, It is a ghost! And they screamed out with fright.  But instantly He spoke to them, saying, Take courage! I AM! Stop being afraid!   And Peter answered Him, Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.  He said, Come! So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water, and he came toward Jesus. But when he perceived  and  felt the strong wind, he was frightened, and as he began to sink, he cried out, Lord, save me [from death]!  Instantly Jesus reached out His hand and caught  and  held him, saying to him, O you of little faith, why did you doubt?  And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased.  And those in the boat knelt and worshiped Him, saying, Truly You are the Son of God!" (Matthew 14:26-33 AMP) When I was twenty-one years old I opened a furniture store with a friend of mine, David.  I had known David for a few years and I worked with him and his father at a furniture store they owned in New York. In the weeks before deciding to open this store I spent time talking to people I knew, thinking about the decision, and praying about it.  Unfortunately I did it in that order.  Almost everyone I spoke with for advice told me it was a bad idea and that I shouldn't move forward with the decision.  I figured that God wanted me to be a millionaire and drive a Jaguar so He must want me to open the store and become very rich, so I went ahead and opened the store.  I never thought I wasn't ready for it or that it wasn't God; it had to be God because it seemed good.  Proverbs 14:12 says "There is a way which seems right to a man  and  appears straight before him, but at the end of it is the way of death."  So I opened the furniture store with David disregarding every red flag, and there were lots of them.   At first the business took off.  We were constantly busy and were able to give ourselves a little raise in salary and even hire an employee to help manage the business.  That lasted a few months.  Then things started to take a turn for the worse and our flaws in character and understanding began to show their weak links.  We struggled to get new business along with maintaining the business we currently had.  I was forced to take two separate loans for the business in my personal name to try and keep the store alive.  When we got the money from the loans we spent it foolishly.  We tried new advertising methods that didn't work. Tension began to grow in our relationship as friends and as business partners.  Arguments followed by times of awkward and hateful silence became daily practice.  The money we did have began to fade quickly and the customers we needed to keep us alive stopped coming into the store.  Bills began to pile up and past due notices started showing up in the mail box.  This was one of the most stressful and frightening moments in my life.  Everyday I woke up wondering if I would make it through the day.  At night after the store was closed and I was alone I would take the bills in my hands and walk around the inside of the store praying for hours, asking God to send the money we needed.  I remember constantly apologizing to Him and asking for a way out of the nightmare. The bad times began to get worse until one day everything exploded in my face.  I had logged into our online bank account for the business as I began to prepare our taxes.  While going through the past 12 months of bank statements I realized my friend and business partner had been spending company money on his personal and family expenses.  Dinners, cell phones, movie tickets, there was a lot of money gone, money that could've helped the business.  The money wouldn't have kept the business alive but it surely would've helped. Once I realized what had been going on I decided to lock David out of the bank accounts in case any more money went missing.  That action led to him and I splitting ways that very day.  When David realized what I had done he exploded in anger.  We argued about things that happened and he decided to leave right then and there, leaving me with the wreckage.  Unfortunately he chose not to stand behind his word and left me with all the debt of the business, though not before he emptied the bank accounts and took the little money the business did have. Two weeks before that last day of business I felt like God told me to begin fasting.  For two weeks I quit listening to music, watching movies and television, and reading books except the Bible.  When I was at home I would pray, when I was driving in my car I had the radio turned off and I would pray.  For two weeks that's what I did.  It was two days after this fast ended that the business went down.  I had a strength in The Lord that I had never known.  I felt at peace, I felt like everything was going to be okay no matter what happened.  The Sunday after I was visiting a local church I had never attended before.  That Sunday the youth pastor was speaking about "getting up".  At the end of the service he began to pray for people from the stage.  As we, in the crowd, stood to our feet the youth pastor began to pray over the congregation.  He began to prophesy saying "there is someone here that has recently lost a business.  Money has been stolen from your bank accounts and The Lord is saying the money will be retuned to you and everything will be okay."  I began to cry standing in that church.  I couldn't believe that God knew me that well, that He used this pastor to comfort me through a prophesy.  I was a total stranger in that church and to that pastor and yet God used that church to bring me peace and strength. I stood my ground while everything piled up against me.  Collectors called wanting their money.  Everything happened so fast and we still had customers that needed the furniture they purchased from us, I had to find a way to get what they purchased.  It wasn't an easy ride, it was rough and scary but through the grace of God I was able to stand my ground and handle everything.  Peter, in the verses above, was asking Jesus to call him out of the boat before Peter was ready.  At first Peter was doing fine, he was walking on the water.  Then the waves began to swirl around him, the winds began to howl and Peter lost his faith.  Peter cried out to Jesus as he was sinking into the water and Jesus saved him. We, as children of God, do something similar.  We ask God to call us into areas of life and into new seasons before we're ready.  God knows we're not ready to handle the trials that will arise if we move forward but He sometimes lets us move forward anyway.  When those winds and waves begin to come against us and we start sinking, Jesus is always there to save us from total destruction.  We have a tendency to move forward in life before we've completed the task before us.

I want you to ask The Lord where you are in life.   It used to be challenging to maintain my focus on who and where I was.  I always looked to who I wanted to become and where I wanted to go and refused to work on myself where I stood.  We have to crawl before we can run a marathon. So ask The Lord for insight, for guidance, and for the strength to understand where you are and how to complete what you've been given.  - Cheers.