I choose God...

My wife and I are going to a spritual retreat next week to The Cove--a ministry/training center started by Billy Graham, located out in North Carolina. I am eagerly looking forward to this and eagerly looking forward to enjoying my Lord all the more. The last few months have been a time of refining and change...enough that I feel I need the time to focus on Christ and His love for me. There were many days that I feared praying only because I feared that God would, in my legalistic mind, whip me into doing something I couldn't bear or would be beyond what I am equipped to do.
It is times like this where the battle for the mind is becoming quite apprent to me and I need to soak it in the pure Word of God (The Bible) in order to help discern truth from fiction. I can either be a Christian who stands on God's Word and proclaims the liberty found in Jesus Christ (and there is!) or I can be a Christian who follows his every feelings or every thought/voice that comes my way, no matter how contraditory these thoughts may be or even how good the "spiritual" activity the thoughts are proposing may be.
Just this trip to The Cove alone was a major struggle--my desire was to worship God and draw near and enjoy Him, to stop the fear and embrace the loving arms of my Saviour. Satan's desire is to take me away -- to draw me closer to a religion of "good works" instead of pursuit of the One who loves me most. I write this now to say, I HAVE DECIDED. I choose to pursue God and His tender mercies, I choose the God who proclaims me His friend through faith(trust) in Jesus, I choose the God who has given me HIS rightiousness through the shed blood of Christ. I choose to trust in God and not in the voices that keep screaming in my ear.
I pray you choose Him too.
I will have a report for you about the retreat after it is done. I am coming broken with no expectations, with fear and trembling, and with hope that the good work God started in me will be further brought to completion through the redemptive blood of Jesus.

Lord, keep me alive in you. Help me to delight in you and to find joy in you. I want to laugh and dance again--I need to laugh and dance again. I do not like myself anymore as I am not the same happy person I was 10+years ago. I think I lived freely then and am scared to live freely now. I am tired of being religious...all I want is You my dear Lord: Your joy, your rightiousness, your peace, your love. You are my hope, you are my life, you are my saviour and you are my God. Come Lord Jesus!