Our daily walk is always trending upwards. We have respites, we have challenges, we have times of refreshing with the Lord, and then our journey continues. We are called up higher into the Spirit, and we obey, working at each step against the pull of the world and our own nature that weighs us down. It is a hard path to follow, even when it is smooth, without obstacles. Many of us are traveling our path with old injuries or nearly-healed wounds to which God is applying His balm whenever the pain returns and we ask it of Him. When our path seems littered with rockfalls and debris, slowing us down and requiring us to carefully, sometimes painfully, clamber over each obstacle it is easy to chafe at the delay from our schedule. On occasion, it can even appear we have come to a dead-end with no clear way forward.

All that God planned at the beginning, and announced through Creation, and prepared for in the garden of Eden, though lost by Adam's disobedience, is restored through the work of Christ. 

Psalm 42:1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for You, O God.

Each of us, when we came to the Lord, were convicted by God's Spirit and His Word of our sinfulness. We were not living right, and we could not do anything about it. We realized our weaknesses, which showed up in each of us in different ways or different areas of our lives, and we gave ourselves and those faults and problems to God. He accepted them, and covered them, and removed them, forgiving us of our transgressions and trespasses against His law, His nature, and gave us a new nature, the nature of His Son, Jesus, which is nurtured and grown through the application of the Word as we read it daily, and the power of the Spirit, as we spent time conversing with God, confessing who He is to us.

What is our reaction to the power of God? How do we react when we see the result of God's hand in someone's life? Does the miracle of a changed personality, a healing and restoring of a broken person attract us irresistibly to learn what the Father has done for them and share what He has done for us?