Element: Prayer and Resistance.

I was praying for someone recently.  They were and are in great pain and we were praying for relief and healing.  I believe in the power of Jesus Christ to heal, I have faith in him.  However, I was not confidant that this man would be healed by way of my prayers.  But I hoped he would and still do.  I'm now untangling some things in my head as I think about it.  Here is the tricky part.  God put me in position to pray for that man, yet it feels now that I was very much in the way of his healing.  I was simultaneously the conduit and the barrier.  Christ put me there to call on his power to be a vessel to carry his love and healing.  It is true that we as believers are the only hands and feet on earth that God possesses.  I was there.  I was willing.  God is able.  So what happened?  There was too much of me in the way.  Pride is a funny, sinister thing.  It has a special power to make a man think so much of himself by way of thinking so little of himself.  Self doubt combined with lack of humility prevented the free flow of the Grace of God.  I, myself, was in the way.  It wasn't the doubt, because I was only doubting myself, not God.  It was my very conscious presence, my inability to get out of the way.  This is struggle to live as John the Baptist says, "I must decrease, that he may increase."  

I will give myself some Grace.  I'm just not there yet, but I want to be.  I want to be less, so he can be more.  I thought my self deprecation was humility, but it was not.  It was just a clever way of being self focused.  God is working his will out in me, yet I'm still very much in his way, but I pray I'm getting better.  Awareness helps.  Until it doesn't.  Such a subtle thing, to be made aware of something and then have to work to shed it from being a diversion.  

A heating element is terribly inefficient by design.  There is so much resistance in the conductor that as electricity tries to move through, the element become very hot.  Sometimes we as the hands and feet of God think it's our jobs to get as heated as possible for Christ.  The reality is that we are to remove the resistance, remove ourselves so that we may more and more efficiently conduct the Grace and Love of God to others.  We are here simply to receive and distribute Christ to a weary world that needs it.  They don't need the heat of our resistance and insistence of our will.  They need the unobstructed power of the living God.  We must get in position and then get out of the way.