When I was a kid, my mom, bless her, was always willing to give me an explanation. She never liked to use "because I said so" to end a debate.

Raising three of me, I don't have that option. I just don't have the time to explain myself every time.

Being a Christian doesn't entitle us to understanding or explanations from God for every circumstance. On the contrary, being a Christian means we should be willing to follow and trust Him, simply because He said so.

Confidence has always come easy for me. Humility, not so much. Trying to learn how to mix both has felt like mixing oil and water.

But if I make a list of everything I've done well without God, and another of list of everything God can't do without me, the lists are amazingly similar.

I've treated humility as if it were ignoring my gifts. But that's not humility, that's just ungrateful. Humility should go hand in hand with confidence, as long as your confidence is in the One who gave the blessing, rather than the one who received it.

And it should also come with the confidence that He gave it for a reason and will be faithful to use it the way He intended.

Not all of our blessings from God come in the package that we wanted. Sometimes they feel like that trick you might have seen at Christmas, where you get a big box and open it to find a smaller box, and repeat until you finally get a very small gift in the end, but it's the best present.

A lot of blessings come from things not going the way we hoped, or maybe even from a disaster or heartbreak. I don't know why God does it this way. I have plenty of theories, but His ways are higher than our ways. And that's really all that matters.