Have you ever felt like there was something in your way? An obstacle that was keeping you from getting to where you wanted to go or becoming what you wanted to be? Sometimes we are fully aware of the thing in the way and feel like we spend our lives crashing into it just to see if it will budge. Sometimes we are avoiding the thing in the way and we spend all our energy trying to get around it, not wanting to have to address that issue and hoping that we can get to where we need to be without having to deal with our obstacle. At other times, we can’t see the obstacle, we aren’t aware of what it is or where it is but we can feel that we need to move, we just don’t know how. These obstacles range from comical to heart-wrenching, from foolish to overwhelming, from real to perceived. For years the only things I thought that were in the way of me being fit and healthy were my love of Dr. Pepper and hatred of exercise; it turned out that the real obstacles were issues of my heart, a desire for immediate satisfaction and an aversion to anything that required sustained effort. An obstacle is anything that is in the way of where we need to go and what we need to be. Some of us sit here today and we face real obstacles, hindrances to the path that we believe that God has created us for and set us on. We might be identifying our obstacles as education, finances, health, grief, bad decisions of our past, incompatibility of our spouse, disengagement of our children, brokenness created or caused by others or even God’s work in our lives being different than we thought, hoped or prayed that it would be. Those are all real things and I don’t want to discount any of them, but what if the true obstacles, the actual things keeping us from knowing who God is, trusting what God says and going where God goes, are all wrapped up inside of us and not somehow binding us from the outside? What if the greatest test of our faith is the shattering of our expectations? What if the honor that God desires is found more in surrender to His heart than commitment to His work? What if we, what we want, what we think, what we believe and what we always have thought, are the obstacle? I pray today that we will move with Jesus from Samaria to Galilee and that we will let Him continue to search our hearts, offend our senses and possibly even rebuke our expectations so that He can teach us how to honor Him and build in us faith that doesn’t just believe but faith that obeys and follows Him.