Be Bold... because God said so!

"Carla, I think they need a piano player. Go tell them you'll play!"

...but I'm just a participant here.
...I don't even know them.
...I don't want them to think I'm a show-off.
...they didn't ask me.

I have a million reasons to say 'no' to my husband. There's just one problem. That's the very thing God has been teaching me this year - to follow my husband. He has given Mark the vision for our family, not me. I am to listen to him and follow him as if he were my lord. (Ephesians 5.22) But that's another blog for another day.

So, I say 'yes' and I am the one to receive the incredible blessing of getting to praise my Lord on the keyboard and with my voice at our 2005 AIM Staff Conference. Then, to my surprise, I hear comments from my new AIM family saying that I blessed them. Incredible. How can God orchestrate something just for me and just for someone else at the same time? He is simply amazing. I love how intricately He has woven our lives together and how, at the same time, our lives may have nothing to do with one another.... It's really quite perplexing how it's all about me even though it's really all about Him.

Well, that's when the best part came. George, the worship leader that night, gave me the most brilliant insight. He gave me the freedom to become bold. No, the command to be bold. Here is what he told me:

When God annoints me to do something, He gives me the authority to do it. But I must do it with confidence. Take, for example, the worst sinner in the world. If he does the worst sins in the world, but he does them with confidence, people will follow him. So if God has annointed me and given me the authority in a situation, I must do it with confidence!

When looking for confirmation, I found the phrase, "Be strong and courageous" eleven times in the Bible. Wow!! How did I miss a thing so important that God said it not once, not twice, but eleven times?!

Now I know how to respond to God's daily guidance - with strength and confidence! (Unlike Moses' first example in Exodus 4.10-13.) I can already hear you asking, "Yea, but how do you know if it's God's guidance and not your own idea, or worse yet, the enemy's idea?" Well, that's where the ATL (Ask The Lord) and asking for confirmation comes in. But that blog will have to wait until tomorrow!