I can tell you that God has repeatedly ‘raised me up’ in the middle of the innumerable situations where ‘up’ had become a hope lost in the darkness of the places to which I had fallen. And while that is the miracle of my story, it sits waiting to be the reality of yours.

After enough failed attempts to rescue myself, I finally realized that I am my own worst first responder.

What are we actually saving ourselves from, other than the failed notion that we can save ourselves?

Really it’s about God saving me from myself, for if that doesn’t happen ‘first’ then there is no ‘second’.

I don’t want to praise myself. Rather, I want to praise the thing that saves me from myself. Hence there is God.

I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.

At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.

I don’t have it within me to do what God does for me. That’s why he’s God and I’m not.

I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can’t. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him.