We all know what it is like to physically flinch. After 911, I flinched when I saw the first airplane in the sky after the attach. I flinched for a few months at turning cars after my mom and I had a bad car accident on an out-of-state trip in a rental car. And, I will forever flinch if I think you are throwing a bug or lizard at me (childhood scars). But, until recently, I never thought about flinching at God.

I look back at the last several years and can remember a list of events that were painful. I think about my dad suffering from and fighting for his life against cancer. I think about some really empty times in my marriage. Money problems. Professional anxiety. I am not talking about our day-to-day pressure. I mean the very hard stuff. The kind that happens to you, rather than something in the news or something far away.

There is no doubt in my mind that God has brought me through each and every dark place. I mean that – – the dark places where, if you don’t quickly realize, it’s you and God, you’ll sink. You can make a move to cling to Him, trust Him and hold His hand through varieties of earthly hell. Or, you can make a move to sink without Him. My doubt and emptiness has often been big, but God has always been bigger. My problems have appeared without resolution or hopeless, but God has never left things that way. My sorrow has taken on forms of depression, but God always delivered me.

One would think that with all the hand holding and carrying God has done for me; with all the deliverance; with all the spiritual victory; that I would not flinch at God. As the new year approached with all of the unknown ahead, I sought God for His plan for 2014. And, before I could get the plan fully down on paper, I started to flinch. Many thoughts crossed my heart. There is the chance that I will write this God directed plan and it could fail. I would hate that kind of failure. Flinch. There is the chance that God will bring me to accomplish this beautiful plan, but what if it can’t be accomplished without pain. Big flinch. Are we going to do a repeat of last year God? Because I will definitely flinch if we replicate February through May of 2013. And, frankly, some of the summer stunk too.

The truth is that I would do February through May of last year eight times over just turn learn the lessons He taught me over that time line. The truth is that it’s Satan that encourages the spiritual flinch. Our God is calling us to wherever He leads. The unknown is good when it is in His hands. I am over my flinching for now. I like idea of going where He goes, whatever the cost.