“Life Is Pain, anyone who says otherwise, is selling something” (The Princess Bride Movie).

Some who are reading this today, woke up in pain.  Maybe not physical pain, but emotional agony for certain.  Circumstances don’t seem to make sense, life is not fair, and those in your life that should have been watching your back insert a knife into it instead.  I met with a family this morning who had just lost their two month old baby girl.  Everyone is devastated. Life truly is painful.  Is there any hope?

A good friend of mine who has been on a 4 year journey of painful experiences, introduced me to the A.S.S. Principle the first day I met him.  It stand for ‘Absolute Soul Surrender’.    When his painful journey began, he gave up the certainty of every single thing in his life, except the ‘fact that Jesus is Lord.”  (Even that fact, was not well understood, but he believed it anyway.)  He had to come to a place where he had to express Absolute Soul Surrender to Jesus and let Him work out the details.  He had to give up ‘trying to control’ all the outcomes for himself, his family, or job.  Each time the anxiety of the pain emotionally began pounding him, he cried out to the A.S.S. principle.  Do you know that Bible verse that says something like, ‘even when we don’t know what to pray, the Holy Spirit hears our groans of agony and interprets the groans and prays ‘for’ us”.  That kind of prayer was happening all the time in my friend’s life. (Still does today!)

Are you a control freak?  Continue reading →