Hoeing Your Own Row, Spiritually speaking!

I've mentioned before that I'm reading "One Thousand Gifts" by Ann Voskamp.http://www.kristen-thehappygardener.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-book.html.  In that post, I mentioned that I was reluctant to read it, based on my experiences with other popular Christian books, but I picked it up anyway. Well, I'm about 3/4 or so of the way through it and I'm finding much of value in the book. The main premise of the book is thankfulness and the importance thankfulness has in maintaining your spiritual perspective. In her book, she talks about a challenge she received to write down 1000 things she was thankful for. Hence the name, "1000 Gifts"  Well, like most books of this type, it's inferred that if you want to experience the same insights she did, you should probably do the same things she did.  So, I did. I got a journal and started writing things down.  And as I did that I started remembering that Bible study I was in years ago where we were studying "The Prayer of Jabez" and how we were sitting in that girls' living room praying that "God would expand our borders" (If you've read the book, you know what I mean. If you haven't read the book, I apologize for the reference.) as if it were some kind of incantation or something. And then we all went away excited for what ever it was that God was going to do in our lives and expecting something very great and exciting.  And, it really never happened.  And then there was the time I kept "looking for where God was working and seeing where I could join Him," a' la Henry Blackaby and "Experiencing God".  And that didn't work either.  And then there were all those times I "put out a fleece (figuratively speaking of course)" like Gideon did in Judges 6-8 and still wasn't exactly sure of what I should do. God never gave me definitive answers like He did Gideon.  And so, I decided to think about this a tad bit and I realized that what I was doing all those times was trying to live someone else's spiritual life. I wasn't really trying to know God, I was just trying to "get spiritual" by "taking a pill." I was trying a formula that seemed to work for someone else and hoping that it would work for me. And that was my problem. God doesn't want us to be spiritual - He wants us to have a relationship with Him. And that is personal.  It is individual. My relationship with God is not a result of what has worked for others, but how God is working in me.  So, I need to hoe my own row and not keep on looking over at what's working for others. (Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop my thankfulness journal. It's actually been very valuable and I've been doing a lot more writing in it about what I see God doing in my life. I'm not saying you shouldn't take ideas from others and make them your own.)