Olivia and I we're really lucky yesterday afternoon to have time to spend with old Friends of our Greg and Heleena. It was an awesome time as they have just had their first child Evangeline Bella Brown. Evangeline is really small but very cute and it was really cool to see one of my best friends as a dad! It was also great because it has been some time since we have had a chance to talk. Greg and I have always strived to raise the bar with each other with regards to our careers, our walk with God, challenging each other on facing upcoming challenges and I found it awesome to spend a couple of hours (and a couple of beers) just chewing the fat with great around some of the topics!

All in all we had a great afternoon, and we realised that we don't get to do these things as much as what we would like these days, perhaps we need to make more time for lazy Sunday afternoons like this!

We live in such a fortunate country that sometimes its strange how our lives are so difficult to comprehend sometimes when compared to those overseas in places such as the middle-east.  They put up with so much that I wonder why we often don't see how fortunate we are, in-stead of being content that we are free to think and say what we want we worry about money and clothes, status and what people think of us.  We get so worked up over conversations that I think a lot of the time that our confidence is often in what we are rather then who we are.

Over the past couple of days I had a few not so pleasant conversations with people with different perspectives then mine.  These have been based around different unrelated issues in my life and the lives of those close to me with different people, but after my talk this afternoon I was quite unsettled and I went to spend some time in prayer.  In most of the cases it has simply been a difference of perspective that has happened and was very easily resolved when we have seen things from the same perspective.   However I mention everything here because as I sat and was praying God really pointed out to me a single question of where my confidence lies.  This really took me back as this was not where my thoughts really were and I have just had to do a double take.

As a fairly advanced IT person I am called to be confident in my skills as and IT person.  This often incorrectly sets us as not having our confidence in ourselves but in our skills (and is more than likely why we change jobs so often).  As a male and a husband I am called (by God as in the bible) to lead my household (alongside my wife I will point out) through life but this position can sometimes make us arrogant and our confidence is often found in what we do for our family rather than once again in ourselves.  Lastly as a leader at my church I am called to both lead and serve people that I am involved with there.  In a lot of cases we can feel as leaders that we have to have all the answers right there and then, that we have to have the right thing to say or do or that person might not make the right choice.  Once again we can put our confidence in the action and not in the right place.

So I come back to the question that God asked of me in my prayer time this afternoon.  Where does your confidence lie?  Now you might not be a Christian or believe in God, but I think that it is an essential question that all of us should ask ourselves from time to time.  If we find that our confidence is in actions, skills and other people then most likely we are setting ourselves up for a fall.  If we find that our confidence is in ourselves and for us Christians centred in ourselves by God himself then we should find that most of this we don't get so easily disappointed by the curves in life.

But I didn't really respond to the question did I.  Where does my confidence lie?  After praying over this question I can say that my confidence mostly lays in me not my actions, it lies within God as he just continues to prove how great he is, though I will admit that as I have been through the rollercoaster of emotions over the past few months that really I did have my confidence elsewhere for a large part....