December 30, 2005

It is truly a time of realization.

In the coming year, it seems that God has planned many things for me.

Many changes from my comfort zone of the past few years.

I feel like God is telling me that I'm going to have to do many things this year that I would not normally take part in or initiate on my own, in the past.

The best example I have of recent memory occured this entire week. I spent the week helping to record some music for a couple of my friends. When they were finished, my old bandmates got together to record a couple of tracks. When all was said and done, I realized one thing. My heart has been moved beyond this point in my life. I feel that God wants me to move on and that it is time to try something outside of the comfort zone of what I have been doing for the past few years in my life, with these friends, musically.

This is in part because through this group of people, one of my worst aspects, being jealousy, firmly takes root and shows through. I say this in reference to the fact of how jealous I got after finding out that the parts for my instrument were recorded before my arrival, by another of my former bandmates. At this point, my jealousy could hardly be contained, and my mood was ruined.

I realize that this is just my ego being bruised, and spiritually, it is something that only God can help me with. I just don't know if my jealousy is a sign or just my own ego.

At the same time, I received a sign that my ability to pay attention needs work.

I say this because what follows cannot, by me, be explained in simple logical terms.

Driving with a friend after hanging out with some other friends, we decided to just drive off the beaten path a bit. We ended up about thirty-five minutes out of the way of home, and were driving in a somewhat wooded area. Before this point, I had never seen a deer in person. Before we got back on the road home, we had seen five, all very close to my car, one nearly running into my car. I didn't see any of them until it was nearly too late each time.

Going from seeing none to five in twenty minutes time was a sign to me. I think I was being told that I need to work on paying attention in life, more to what's going on, instead of so much on myself.

Does God really always work in mysterious ways, or do we just not want to take the time to notice why something happens?