PPG
Hard work, discipline and determination are still good things as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve built most of my life on them. The pot wasn’t wrong to have them in it. The trouble crept in somewhere around the middle. I stopped asking God for help with any of it, and started keeping a quiet sort of score of how little I seemed to need Him. I never said that out loud. I’m not sure I’d have admitted it if anyone asked. But it was there in the way I made plans, and in how badly I took it whenever something went differently than I’d arranged. That’s the ingredient that ruins the whole pot, and it isn’t the effort. It’s the belief, arrived at slowly and comfortably, that the effort was mine and the results were owed. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” — Proverbs 3:5 Leaning is such a quiet word for it. You don’t notice you’ve been doing it until the thing you were leaning on moves, and then you find out how much weight you’d put on it. What the pot was missing was never more of me. It was Him. Are you adding pride, or faith?
Comic transcript
PPG — Risen Archive comic no. 003.
Panel 1. a hand tips an ingredient into a mixing pot. Me: Hard work..
Panel 2. more is added to the pot. Me: Discipline..
Panel 3. another handful goes in. Me: Determination..
Panel 4. the full pot. I thought these were the ingredients to a perfectly good life..
Panel 5. the pot, moments before. ..but then I added one more thing..
Panel 6. black smoke erupts and the boy recoils. PRIDE
Panel 7. the blast throws him backwards.
Panel 8. sparks and debris settle.
Panel 9. the boy sits in the wreckage, a friend in a lab coat beside him. Me: ..what happened?
Panel 10. his friend delivers the verdict. Her: ..you added everything.. ..except faith.
Closing card: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” — Proverbs 3:5
Are you adding pride, or faith?