When I was in the second grade, I went camping with a group of boys from my church. That night around the campfire, our leader told us that Jesus is God’s Son. He told us that we had all sinned, and that made perfect sense to me. I had two brothers, we fought all the time, and I could probably list a half dozen sins I had committed earlier that day. Then our leader told us that Jesus had died so that our sins could be forgiven, and that sounded like a great idea to me. But then our leader said, “Unless you ask Jesus into your life, and unless you ask Him to forgive you for your sins, you don’t have Jesus in your life.”

Up to that point, nothing our leader said had been a surprise to me. I grew up in a Christian home. We went to church every Sunday. I had heard it all before. But until that day, I just assumed that God was with me and that He loved me. After all, I was a pretty arrogant child. What’s not to love about me? That night I discovered that God does indeed love me, that Jesus died for me and that God wanted to be a part of my life.

Later that night when our leader asked if any of us wanted to invite Jesus to be our Savior, I raised my hand, because I didn’t want to spend one minute separated from God. I prayed with our leader and asked Jesus to be my Savior.
When God is in charge, though, it seems that at every stage of your life there are new things that you have to turn over to God, and there are new ways that God shapes you. At each of these stages, you have the chance to know God better and see even more of how amazing He is.

I remember it happened when I was a teenager. I was in junior high, and I was so miserable that I wished I could die. I remember clearly one night getting down on my knees by my bed and praying to God. I prayed, “God, if you want me to live, then something is going to have to change. I am going to have to live for you.” And I turned something more over to Him that night.

Here’s the amazing part. God put life into me. I am not saying that God made everything easy from that point forward. But I knew then that God was with me, so I could press on. Somehow I had found that I could live for God, and that thought helped me get through the darkest days of my life.

As an adult I keep trying to take my life back from God. When I was in junior high and miserable, it was kind of easy to turn my life over to God. He couldn’t make a worse mess out of it than I had. But as I became an adult and started to get good at a few things, I kept finding myself taking control and trying to do things myself.

In college, I thought I was smarter than God. Well, maybe not smarter than God. But I certainly started to think that I understood the Bible better than the people who wrote it. That led me down some bad paths in my beliefs, and God had to shake me in order to get my attention and draw me back to Him. When I started in ministry, I followed my agenda instead of asking God what He wanted me to do. God had to step into my life again, shake me and get my attention. Since then I’ve had to learn that God even has a plan for how I am supposed to be a husband and a father, and sometimes His plan is different from mine. But here’s the good thing—every time I let go and follow His plan, He shapes me and shows me how good He is.