Sleep, Lord's Prayer, Now and the Future

I'm writing some posts about my journey as a new Christian.  Currently I'm very much in the low foothills of faith. I pray these posts may help someone.

Woke up early, again. Hey ho. Nowadays, when I remember, I turn to the Lord; sometimes I pray for my Christian brothers and sisters, my family, those I know in need. Woo, get me. Usually I do some breathing exercises whilst repeating The Lord's Prayer. Often this settles my mind and I wake later having dropped off. Nice. Not always and this morning I didn't drop off but Praise the Lord I felt enough oomph to pull myself from my bed to write this blog. I follow Jesus. I still don't know (or do I?) what this really means and I often feel a fraud, squinting at myself like "you do? are you sure? what does THAT even mean?", but a year or so back I "made the decision" to become a Christian as I just couldn't work it all out for myself. I gave in. All the efforts with full-on psycho-analysis, mindfulness training, meditation, trying to get like Paul (from Dune not the Bible), like some kind of mentat human computer. "Fear is the mind killer" stuff. It had its moments. This blog is going to be a stream of consciousness thing from my perspective, my journey into faith. It's not going to be high-falutin' with lots of learned Bible passages. No doubt I'll get many things wrong, dipping my toes into every denomination and flavour of Christianity and none [I follow Jesus, that's enough]. No doubt to some it will seem self-pitying, judgmental, offensive, heretical, etc. 

I will think it a failure if I start over-editing my words, sanitising them to avoid offending anybody, be more pretty, amusing,  dogmatic or fitting with any agenda. I want to move away from being a chameleon (trying to fit in wherever I am) and start acting with integrity and courage.

Where am I? Out-of-work. Knackered or stuck. Confused where this goes, believing that God has been putting these opportunities to pause and reflect in my path, but I've been stubbornly  pushing them away. "Think of your pension". The siren voice of our western world where we always think and are told to think of the future, not being in relationship with Jesus and with the people around us. Trying to get more, more, more. Trying to build the bulwarks higher and higher to hide away from the rising tide of desperation and downright "evil" that's all around us in our desperate materialistic society.

Where do I want to be? True to myself, what the Lord has in store for me. Living, joyful, helping, gracious. No sitting on every bloody fence. But I admit, and it's currently HUGE, that I obviously don't trust the Lord anywhere near totally enough as I don't want to lose (or even risk losing) my comfortable house and lifestyle to go and work in some desperately poor inner-city area where the desperation is full of knives, guns, drugs, rape, violence, poverty. I read books like "The Cross and the Switchblade" and I suppose it reinforces my attraction to my current place in society and the magnetic attraction of it. Every time I read these books they (on 1 level) reinforce "staying put". The dread of "giving it all up". But that's just the perspective from here and now. The reality, even if God wants me to go into some dive, is that God wants me to trust Him. I don't believe that that has to be a land of milk and honey, but probably, if I let it, wherever I'm supposed to be will bring joy? If I let it and don’t fight it. If I go with it. A multitude of excuses; lack of faith, it's not fair on my wife and family, I'm ill equipped, what would mum/mates/society think. Surely there's another way, where I can stay in my nice house and still do what God wants? I dunno. The truth is that on my own efforts I've managed to scramble and fight my way to a pretty average place. No complaints (not anymore), but I recognise that the constant scrapping to keep my place as some middle-class twonk, my dignity and pride has led me to this average place, sitting on a fence. Fearful. Frantically running but moving know where. I feel I had the necessary intelligence and upbringing to have been successful in some business venture, but that fence post of fitting in (and also knowing something isn't right) held me back.