Ken Boa Reflections Ministries

Dr. Ken Boa: We are launching a new topic and a new series. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Recalibrate Your Life: Navigating Transitions with Purpose and Hope. We all go through transitions, and it is necessary to sometimes take an inventory of our life and our journey. Where have we come from? Where are we here? And where are we going? I love the cover because you have this kind of treacherous journey. You can see the red lines here, and it goes through Scylla and Charybdis and all this turmoil.

Then you get across to the other side. It is a little bit more peaceful. You see a nice dolphin and a nice rainbow. You are getting across to the beginning of the country itself. But what you are doing is purpose and hope. That is your real theme that we are dealing with here, having an understanding of what life is about. It has 15 chapters. In addition to the 13 here, there is an introduction and a conclusion.

My job is to take you through a chapter a week, and that is not easy to do. But what I want to talk about is perspective. What gives meaning to life? What does it mean to leave a godly legacy? These are little minor points like this, numbering your days. How profound and powerful that can be. Treasuring God and people, moving from career to calling. Because you never, as we have said before, retire from a calling. You may retire from a career, but not from your vocation, your calling.

What does it mean to have a kind of reboot, a redeployment as it were, when we think about retirement instead of having this wrong approach that I fear most people take to retirement? They fritter their best years away in the wrong pursuits. From a perspective standpoint, I have perspective, purpose, and practice—the three P's. It involves understanding and then discovering what your unique purpose is. It is important for us as we go through our journey to revisit what are the things that matter most.

What are the things that I have gotten insight from? How do I learn from life? You want to be a student all your life and you want to get better and better as you go. That is what this is about. Speaking of that, there is the whole area of what God has given you—the stewardship of your time, talent, treasure, truth, and relationships—and then living so that the best is yet to come. I am just going to be pulling out some little bits and pieces here. I have these little red dots. Those red dots are the things I want to point out because I cannot possibly teach this chapter in the time we have got.

But what I can do is pull out a few insights that I want to share in each of these chapters. I am praying that this would be a timing issue for all of you that you need at this time of year. In fact, in our January reflections on Substack, we are going to be talking about kicking off the new year. We need to recalibrate. So this is a thing we are going to be featuring. Really, what we are trying to do as we grow older and we prepare our handoff to the next generation, or if we are younger, we want to gain wisdom from people who are down the road from us.

If we are smart, it will be a transgenerational sharing of sagacity. What is sagacity? It is to be a sage, to be a person who has qualities of Christlikeness that seem to be practical and hard-earned. You see, it is not just living and learning, but it is learning and living. You have to do both. You are a person who learns from one's experiences and mistakes and gains wisdom from that. God is always seeking to transfer our hope and affections from the temporal to the eternal.

That is what recalibration really looks like. Times of change, times of transition, and even more importantly, our response to them, are going to have a dramatic impact on the course of our journey. The landscape of our lives can be changing. There are some things that are life transitions. There are voluntary transitions like graduating from college or graduate school, getting married, moving, starting a new job, having a child, or quitting your job to raise or help raise your kids or grandkids.

There are also involuntary transitions, things you did not put in your calendar. Things like getting a divorce, emerging from an abusive relationship or other trauma, transitioning from military to civilian life, losing your job, or facing some other career setback or disappointment. Losing a loved one, such as a parent, spouse, child, or sibling. Getting notice from your company that you are being forced to retire. Becoming a full-time caregiver to an ailing spouse or family member.

These pivotal times, whether forced against our will or things that we planned, are both critical moments that should be invitations to consciously process where we have been, where we are now, and where we are headed. That to me is very critical. My desire at the heart of this whole thing is for people who have taken the time to get back and get an assessment of their life. Do a revisit. They never regret doing so. It is a way of learning around, and the more we do this, the more skillful you become.

Because life is a matter of gaining skill, that is what wisdom is. The wisdom literature is always about gaining wisdom and skill and insight. You remember how I have told you before that we learn far more from our setbacks and sorrows and sufferings than we ever learn from our successes. Good decisions come from experience, and most of that comes from making bad decisions. So the wisdom you have learned from the experience of making bad decisions actually can then be used to help you make better decisions next time around.

You gain acuity and skill, and you never want to stop learning. As soon as you stop learning, you start dying. You wither. A lot of people, sadly, have retired and they fritter away their best years. It is a unique time where people live longer than they did before. They have more options than the previous generations had. As well, they had greater wealth up until recently. That is changing for various reasons, but the point is we still have more possibilities and options than my grandfather ever could have dreamed of, and my father as well.

It is amazing what you can do with these new options and using these times to align our affections and thoughts with what God calls valuable. After all, the value of a thing is what God says it is. It is what God reveals that it is. If you want to know what is to be treasured and what is to be held with a loose grip, Scripture makes that very clear. Again, it tells us in Luke 16 that the things that are highly esteemed among men are worthless in God's sight. He tells this to the Pharisees.

The fact is you can spend your short time in this world pursuing toys, trinkets, and tinsel and ignore the actual gift of the infinite joy that God is calling us to pursue. We got all settled on the secondary, the temporary. The wise thing we do is to treat things according to their true value, which is to hold the temporal with a loose grip and to treasure and to cultivate an appetite and aspiration for that which is going to endure. That is hard to do. It goes against the culture and it goes against the grain for us to treasure the unseen over the seen, the not-yet over the now.

Wouldn't you agree that is hard? But isn't that the nature of faith? What does it say in Hebrews 11:1? Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, which means you do not have them yet. It is the conviction of things not seen. For me to esteem those things which are not yet over those things which are visible and those things that are not tangible over those things that are, that takes risk. We have to align our affections and set our hope on that which endures and to channel our actions and motivation toward the unique purposes that God provides for us.

If you train yourself to become a student of your life and of the life that God's given you, and get a kind of sacred history journal and recall His encounters with you, you become a person who's training yourself to become more astute and to recognize that the lessons of the past are to be gained and they are not to be regretted. They are to be seen as lessons, often hard-earned and hard-learned. Those are severe mercies that sometimes God allows in your life. The most powerful moments of knowing Him and intimacy with Him is a result of the severe mercies of God, that He takes things away from us to draw us ever closer to Himself.

We wonder what He is doing. I have learned to stop asking the question "why." I figured that out because I cannot figure out what "why" is on anything in the natural world. Why should I know of the spiritual world? Is it going to be easier? I cannot understand anything in the natural world. I finally figured that out. The best scholars are the ones who know enough to know how little they know. You become more aware of your exceeding ignorance and then you marvel at all that God's got for us.

You stop asking why and you believe that there is a person who ordered it and there is a direction and an end to which it is all moving. God has appointed you and called you and anointed you. He has appointed you and anointed you. He has actually adopted you. He has called you for a purpose even before time. It says before time began, Scripture mentions that God had us in His heart. That is what gives you meaning. You are not a random occurrence. You are not an episode between two oblivions, but rather you are a person who is an agent who is going to move on into the next world, into the next reality.

That reality is going to be a resurrected world and a resurrected body. That is really something I need to think more about as I am getting older. I am forced to think about the next life more as a result of the adversities that I have encountered than I ever was before. Those are severe mercies as well. To set my hope on that which endures, to channel my actions and motivations toward the unique purpose and opportunities, life becomes more of an adventure when you are open to the promptings and the small graces of the Holy Spirit.

You can begin to train yourself to become more conscious of it and invite and evoke the Spirit of God to give you a sense of what is this event and how am I to treat it, how am I to handle that? Those are important components. We have a bunch of tools in this book. In fact, there are 18 of them that we have. Rooting your identity in Christ, a guide to a personal recalibration retreat. What would it be like if you had one year to live? Creating a legacy journal or document, principles and values to live by, and other things of this sort.

The first tool is in this chapter, this introduction. Rooting your identity in Christ. Why do I put that there? It's obvious. If you do not grasp who and whose you are, you are going to be floundering in this world. A man will live out his understanding of his identity. Most people's identity is defined incorrectly. It is defined by the world around us, by the culture, by the society, and you do not have a secure basis at all if you base it on that. You and I have to grasp who and whose we are, and that is why these recalibrate.

You have to calibrate in order to recalibrate. Some people have never actually done it at all. Who am I? Some fundamental questions we have talked about many times before when we think about this whole idea of meaning and so forth. These four questions: Where did I come from? It's the question of meaning. Who am I? It's the question of identity. Who gets to define you? Why am I here? It's the question of purpose. Where am I going? It's the question of hope.

Really, in going through these events, especially when you go through adversity, or it can also be a transition of a new thing that's happened in your life that's a good thing, either way, it's an invitation to back off, get perspective, recalibrate, and revisit these four truths in light of these things that have happened in your life. You are not an accident. You have meaning. You are defined not by the world but by the Word. You have a purpose that God has given you and called you to fulfill. You are going to a context in which the best is yet to come.

I like to celebrate wonderful moments in my memory of great experiences I have had. I did it again last night, tried to do a little experiment. I learn about her every time I do this. What things come to your mind as things that were particularly meaningful to me? She summed up one thing I had not thought about in years and totally forgot about. Then it all came back. It flooded my mind. It was a special experience we had. The beauty of that experience gave her pleasure to even remember it. That is not an end in itself, but a hint of a better good to come.

Whatever you loved in that is a hint of new things that are going to be prepared for you that are going to be beyond your capacity to know, that they are going to be even better. You are not going to be looking back with regret and disdain and say, "But I thought, but you said." It is going to be better than you guessed. This is why I constantly emphasize the need for seeing that the best is not in the past as most people suppose. The best years of our lives—remember that film that came out in the '40s—but rather the best is yet to come if we think about the fact that we haven't seen anything yet.

But the best you have ever known are in my mind can be leveraged so that I do not live with remorse and regret, but I live with a growing anticipation. I have got to find creative ways to do it as I get older. I am running out of time. It goes by faster because your perception of time increases. The older you get, the faster it goes by. All these are invitations as sojourners and aliens, wanderers, strangers, pilgrims, exiles, being a tenant in this world. How brief it is, this short life we live.

It is good for us to revisit on a regular basis to do that. One of the ways I recalibrate is my identity affirmations. These handful that we have here are powerful truths that go contrary to the world system. It is important for us to see. The more I grasp and choose to believe these things are so of me, even though I do not feel this way—my citizenship is in heaven, for example, from which I eagerly wait a Savior who is going to transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body that He has, even to subject all things to Himself.

That is your citizen. You are not a citizen of this world. You are a pilgrim, a sojourner, a wayfarer, a wanderer, a stranger. Those exile images, aliens, to be a tenant. You don't own anything. Hold it with a loose grip. But you are being prepared for an eternal home that is going to be far beyond all comprehension in our minds now. Once again, I do this thought experiment. What will it be like when I am there? My suspicion is that the things I will regret most will never be the pain I endured in this world, but rather when I did not actually obey Him, love Him enough, trust Him enough to do what He called me to do. That will be my regret more than anything else.

We won't be defined by that, though, because you go further up and further in. But it's God's grace. If I had only known, I would have actually chosen to milk this moment, this opportunity. Every day is a gift. Every day is a mini-life. Every day has its birth, its growth, its decay, and its death. Just as every year has its birth, growth, decay, and death. Just as every life has its birth, growth, decay, and death. Just as every nation has its birth, growth, decay, and death. And just as every civilization has all four.

It is a process we should not be surprised that those rhythms are there. To notice every day and to treat it as a mini-life is a smart way to live. Asking the Spirit of God to give you new eyes and new perspective. The more you grasp your identity in Christ, the more secure you become, the less you have to prove, the more you approach relationships out of the overflow of life in Him rather than out of deficiency to approach relationships as vehicles to get your needs met.

You can become other-centered. Without God, recalibration is a dead end, an exercise in futility, boiling down to self-improvement. Clearly, I am not just saying that this will work unless it's Christocentric. It's theocentric. It has to be built around the one who made us and for whom all things come. It's one of the things that bothers me about hymnody in the last century or two, that it gets more and more anthropocentric and not theocentric. It is much more about us and our experiences than it is about Him.

I think we do well to remember who it is that life is about rather than emphasize our experiences. It is to find our identity in Him, and then knowing that that is your identity, that is your dignity, and that is who you are. Your life is hidden with Christ in God. Then you have a great glorious hope and future that God's prepared for you. Otherwise, recalibration would just be an exercise in futility. But you see, we are recalibrating to maintain or regain an eternal Christ-centered perspective and to apply that Christ-empowered perspective in every component of our life so it affects us all across the board here.

These various tools that we use are designed to help us focus less and less on what is passing away. The world is passing away and also its lusts. But the one who does the will of God abides forever. There is a role of suffering that we mention in this introduction just to give an understanding. Every transition that we go through is a loss of some kind, of life as it once was. Our two sons are about to get married, reflecting one father. We have been preparing them for this. This has always been our goal, to launch them.

Yet even as he and his wife are excited for this next stage, perceiving God's plan unfolding in their sons' lives, the excitement is tinged with grief. Life will never be the same again. There is an element of sadness alongside the happiness. Life is this way. My view is that your longings, your desires, your aspirations are really hints of better goods to come, hints of home that will be so extremely wonderful that when you look back, you will realize, "Oh, if I could have only known."

But I believe that in a fallen world, there's a kind of mixture of those things that we want and those things that hurt us. We know what that's like, and suffering is a vehicle that God uses. We are rooted in an unchanging character, not in our circumstances, and that is where recalibration comes in. You and I have been called to be men of character, a consistency, who are not defined by the external circumstances but by the eternal. Your life is hidden with Christ in God.

There is a quality about you, and this is what I am praying for each one of you men who are here, that you would have a quality about you that the Spirit of God would give you as you walk in the Spirit that demands an explanation. There is something about you that cannot just be written off. There's a quality. What makes you able to hold up rather than fold up? What makes you so willing to serve other people or to give them attention and not to always have to be about you, but rather more and more realizing that every day, I die daily and Christ grows?

As He increases, I decrease. He must increase and we must decrease. The beauty in that irony is that as you decrease, then you really find your true self. You never find it by trying to find it; you find it by losing it. This unchanging character of God, not my circumstances, is what really anchors my soul. One of my favorite verses, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, often comes to my mind as a text that I will chew on and sometimes summon up several times in the course of a day.

When the Spirit of God gives you a particular text of Scripture, regard that as an invitation. Maybe write it down or choose to chew on it. Be creative. Do not get yourself in a rut. People do this all the time. But rather the Spirit of God is far more creative and wants us to find new ways of expressing and experiencing this life. There is all kinds of ways of doing that, surprising things. The encounters that God gives you, many things will be these Kairos moments.

But it's not so much the circumstances of our pain, but our response to that pain that matters. Pain and suffering and adversity and affliction and sorrows and setbacks are not options. After you have suffered for a little while, not if. You will suffer. It is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens. This perspective that we have of what do we gain from that and do we learn from that pain—don't want to waste it.

We have talked so many times about Kairos and Chronos. Chronos is your calendar time, clock time. You can put it in your planner. You can never plan God's timing because God interrupts us. Remember the training to learn to grasp—it is not an interruption. It has got to be another eye. It's an invitation. I have to say I have to empty myself of my agenda before I am going to regard this as something that should be welcomed even though it was not convenient at the time. Most Kairos moments aren't convenient. They come and grab us.

The question is what do you do with it? There is a sort of a mini-emptying, a kind of a death. You have to die to your own delusions about thinking you have God's best interests at heart, thinking that you have your best interests at heart. Actually, He always wants better for you than you would choose for yourself. But the issue is I have got to submit to that. In this Kairos recalibration, that's when you are being forced, whether you like it or not, to recalibrate. The circumstances have hit you.

My friend Archie Wannamaker was going to be with me today visiting, and he is in California because his sister seems to be on death's door. That was a Kairos experience that he's got to address. Each of these things come up and then you have to adjust accordingly. But there's Chronos recalibration as well, when you can actually plan times of doing that. There's micro, midi, and macro. We can recalibrate on a daily basis or weekly basis—those are micro recalibrations.

We can do it on a monthly basis, a midi recalibration. At the beginning of the month, I try to do something where I kind of just turn the calendar. Going to the next page is like a symbolic act that I need to revisit and review. But what I find myself doing, the macro, is always at the end of the year and most of us do that. I would advise you to make this a regular opportunity to take some time as the year winds down to reflect on what was the year like and where are you going to go with that.

Those are invitations. I call those Chronos because I am planning it. I am putting it in my calendar to make it a process because I want to revisit my desires and objectives and make it a prayerful matter. There are ways of doing this. I can actually schedule that kind of Chronos recalibration into my calendars. I cannot schedule Kairos. That will happen in His timing. But I had better train myself to be open to the surprising prompts and works of the Spirit of God. You just do not know what's going to happen.

Certain encounters will take place. Yesterday was an example I was telling Lewis about, this remarkable person I met, tremendous capacity and so forth. It was one of those unexpected things and some connections took place there that were very extraordinary. You just don't know. Then I had a special meeting on Tuesday. All kinds of new things came out of the blue I didn't plan on. You have to be open to those fresh surprises. I think it can be very helpful to do that.

Recalibrations are very critical. Veering off course by one degree. When a ship is moving in the right direction, but it's a little bit off, after time, that one degree becomes amplified. It may be imperceptible and you're off course. Without a course correction, you're going to get miles off course. You have got to right the ship, and then it will take more effort at that point. The short mini-adjustments are wise because it makes more sense for us to be doing this on a regular basis.

Wanting our lives to matter. At the heart of recalibrating is a deep desire to make your life count. You want to recognize that there is a deep desire for God in us to persevere to the end, to press on and to hear those words, "Well done, good and faithful servant." I'd rather hear those words rather than "You may come in." Many will hear "You may come in" because getting into His presence is by grace through faith, not by works. But there will be many who will miss out on what could have been because they chose not to walk in obedience because they believed the lie that they knew better than God what their best interests look like.

I want to persevere, press on to finish well to hear the "well done." I think my desire is for you as well that you would have that same desire. The failure to live and finish well does not hurt us alone; it hurts others as well. Even the people that know you and love you will be diminished if you do not pursue your calling. So your calling is going to affect other people whether you like it or not. You do not have an option. You cannot sin in a vacuum. You cannot even sin without someone making notice of the thing, but it's going to affect something and it's going to be there.

It is a remarkable thing that it begins to produce something that is subtle. It may not even be known, but when there is a compromise in your life, your heart is not united to fear His name. His desire is for you to live clean and to live before Him so that it's a kind of a way that it spills over and enhances and encourages rather than discourages other people. The last thing we end up with in this introduction is a guide to the second tool, a guide to a personal recalibration retreat.

I try to do that near the end of the year, a half-day or one-day retreat. If you ever do that—and I strongly encourage you to do so—it might be a good idea to have an idea of what you might do that day. We talk about what that looks like, how do you prepare for a one-day or half-day retreat. It's right here in the book. We talk about leaving electronics at home, turning them off, not checking them except for an emergency. Take a journal or notebook, just practical stuff.

I have done this before on numerous occasions and never regret doing it because it forces you to kind of revisit. You have these four looks. You have this backward look and reflect on the story that God's written into your life. You have a whole life review and a one-year review you can do. There is also the upward look, focusing on being in His presence. Then the inward look, an honest self-assessment in light of those two looks that you've just taken. Then the forward look. What do you want your life to look like as you move toward the future?

You make those recalibrations. That is where we are. We just finished the first chapter. I like these illusions, you see, but the essence of it is going to be in that. So I want to find this page for you that I think might be of value for you to reflect together on. What we're really trying to do here is to align our affections and thoughts with what God calls valuable. Secondly, to set our hope on what endures. And third, to channel our actions and motivation toward the unique purpose and opportunity God places before you.

The more you're aware of it, the more you will be aware, and you're going to realize life is full of these encounters if you notice it and respond to it. One of the men in my group was talking about the idea of this exercise, this tool number two—a guide to a personal recalibration retreat. The backward look, the upward look, the inward look, and the forward look. Then he mentioned the idea of doing that in a group. I think that's possible. I have not done it with a group before, but I could see it as a possibility.

But I want you to notice as well that there's also a Kairos recalibration that you didn't plan. That is more focused than this other one. This other one you're planning it, and so you're doing these questions. But the Kairos has to be focusing on the current situation, what's going but you still take those looks. Just try to figure out ways to make it where you can gain from your adversity and perspective on pain and so forth.

Guest (Male): I just had a question. If you could talk about when Paul talks about laying aside the past and being able to move forward.

Dr. Ken Boa: Forgetting what lies behind and pressing on to what lies ahead. That is a good word. He has got a telos, an end, a purpose. That is one of the things we're talking about is what is the end for which I am called. So forgetting what lies behind, it is okay to look back at the past, just do not stare at it. It is a dangerous thing to do. The past could be gaining on you, you're right. But the idea of forgetting what lies behind means that you're really intending no longer to be defined by the past but by what's going to be done that God's going to do and bring it into redemption.

It is a creative modality rather than defining ourselves by the past. We're actually being defined by the best that is yet to come. So how can I no longer be defined by that as I choose to not let that define me, forget what lies behind, but anticipate what's coming ahead? It turns me from a negative dimension to an anticipatory consciousness. Otherwise, I am going to live with regret and remorse, and that's not what's intended to be done. It is intended to figure out what is good, what you want more than anything else, and focusing on that.

It is really being a grace-filled person and living a grace-filled life because you realize we are not getting what we deserve. The more we learn about life, the more we realize you don't want to get what you deserve. Never ask for justice. I want what's coming to me and I want it now. Zap! You're out of here! I want it now! Ashes to ashes. Yeah, you'd be fizzled out. Forget what we're asking for. But I think that forgetting what lies is a choice that he makes because he's fixing his eyes on the goal rather than the past.

Once again, it's a future-oriented direction. But even the pain of the past can be redemptive and it can invite us to see how that can enhance what God is doing in me. So I'm being shaped by suffering once again. I'm focusing on the good that God's going to bring out of it. And that's the whole thing. Remember as I've said before on several occasions, that Jesus never asks us to give up anything without promising a greater good in the end. He doesn't say just give up your life and that's it. He says, you lose your life, and what's going to happen as the outcome of losing your life? You're going to find it. His life for your life. So He wires us for gain and profitability. There's nothing wrong with that. We are wired for gain and profitability, just do not try to make that gain and profitability in this world. It is not defined by that. It is defined by what He is preparing you for in your eternal citizenship. You are in a soul-forming world, just a few decades, but you gain those things which will never disappoint, you see. So that is a vision of a life well-lived.

Guest (Male): Yeah, I've had a couple of questions that I wanted to ask you for the last year or so, and they have all been building up. Not to put the pressure on you, but I asked these guys at this table here the same questions, and what they gave me was, I think, a lot better than what I would have heard from you. So not to put the pressure on you, but to take the pressure off of you, I'm satisfied with their answers. But I still want to ask them.

Dr. Ken Boa: What did they say? I am ready to be instructed.

Guest (Male): So here are two questions, they're kind of really related. Back when you were going through John, for about six or seven weeks in a row, you would use this phrase of our co-crucifixion with Christ. And then over the last Bible study, the phrase, one of the phrases that you used a lot was Jesus living His life in you as you. And so the question I wanted to ask was really about your experiential knowledge of the real Jesus being in you. So that's my question for you.

Dr. Ken Boa: All right. A lot of these things, again, we have talked about this many cases, but these two cards have become very meaningful to me. A day doesn't go by where I don't quote them because it's so critical, because they are invitations to intimacy. They are invitations to move from head to heart and from knowing to being. So that's really His issue. The issue he wants to have is at the center of your being a relationship, in Christ, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

So that "you in me and I in you," that co-crucifixion again and we saw as you said this card here. Your co-crucifixion has to do with your sanctification. So the basis of your salvation is His life for you, but now you are identified with Him so richly in His death, burial, and resurrection that His life becomes your life, His death was your death, and His resurrection yours. So it's not just that you're trying to imitate Him. You've been identified with Him. Identification is the key to imitation. You've already been now in Christ, that's who you are. Now live it out. And then living His life through you as you, so through the prism of your personality so that the Spirit of God manifests Himself in a unique way because of your unique spirit.

So that's a process of intimacy. What I'm focusing on with these cards was always this idea of knowing this not in your head, but also in your heart. Having, as he says in the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, well, how can you have a knowledge which surpasses knowledge? He is now clearly talking about personal experiential and relational knowledge, and that's what I'm seeking for you to do as well. Because having it in your head is not enough. It's theoretical. So you pray for the grace of that intimacy and it can only be the things of the Spirit are only spiritually appraised. So it is 1 Corinthians 1. Who knows the mind of him? He has the Spirit. So if you invite the Spirit of God who is living in you to rule and reign in you.

This is why I have these things that "Trust the Father, Abide in the Son, Walk by the Spirit." This little summary still helps me on a regular basis. So any tool that the Spirit has used in your life, use it and then keep on adding to your toolkit so you don't get into a rut. But find things that really do work for you, and these kinds of affirmations work well for me and these kinds of principles, they work well. So I'm just trying to find ways in which I can understand that and grasp this dynamic because this is trinitarian—to trust the Father. I'm not going to understand Him, but to trust Him. To abide in the Son, not create life but receive His life and display His life. I don't create life; He does. I'm receiving and displaying His life. Walk by the Spirit. This is an ongoing process where I keep in step with the Spirit, so it's a divine-human synergy. It is a relational walk together. All of us were called to intimacy that way. And then you share those experiences with one another. I don't know if that helps or not, but that's my starting with identity. So if I grasp who and whose I am, and if I choose—remember the phrase and I'll leave with this—choosing to believe that what God says about you is true, in spite of your feelings and experiences to the contrary. The more you choose to acknowledge it, the more it becomes real in your experience.