When Success Becomes Self-Reliance

The useful part

When everything is falling apart, when you've exhausted every option and you're standing at the end of yourself, you pray. You reach for God the way a drowning person reaches for anything that will hold their weight. In the early years of his reign, he was a man who prayed before every battle.

How it works

• When the Ethiopians came against him with an army that outnumbered his forces in ways that made the situation militarily impossible, he didn't call his generals into a strategy session first.
• A king who knew, in his bones, that what he had and what he was able to do was not his own doing.
• Because the proof that self-reliance is dangerous is not always an immediate collapse.
• The silence of God's voice starts to feel less like absence and more like permission.

Details worth keeping

The desperate seasons have a way of keeping you connected to the Source. Lord, it doesn't matter whether we have many or few. He had the gold, the connections, the experience.