It's an issue of trust.
The following was inspired from my daily ODAT meditation.
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding in all your ways acknowledge God and God will direct you paths." Proverbs 3:5-6
This sets me free if I believe it.
When life gets too intense and I am not sure which way to turn I am encouraged to let go and let God. I do not have to figure life out on my own. I don’t have to know which path to walk down. I get on my knees and I tell God everything on my heart… all my fears, hopes, dreams, and doubts. I ask God to help me trust him. I tell God I want to believe and I ask him to help my unbelief. I become willing to trust. Are you willing to trust?
I have to do the more difficult, yet simple thing, and that is to trust God with all my heart.
Albert Einstein said, "God always takes the simplest way." (He didn't say least or most safest, least painful, or most trying.)
Someone once asked me where I get my faith and I responded through surrender. It seems that it would be just the opposite that surrender comes through faith, but for me, surrender increases my faith. The more I surrender and trust God with my life, the more faith I have.
To trust: give myself over to God fully, surrender, assume, bank on, be convinced, bet on, build on, calculate on, confide in, count on, depend on, expect, hope, lean on, look to, rely upon.
I do not know how it works, but it does-- every time.
Dante wrote: "In His will is our peace."
2 Comments:
Finding comfort in contradiction is paramount to having an active relationship with the Creator...I see no other way around it.
Strength in weakness. Increased faith through surrender. Directed pathways through dependence.
Virgin birth. Losing life to gain it. Gaining the world & losing your soul.
How can we not simply trust the One who's done it all, just to be with us? He paid it all to give worth to the unworthy, love to the unlovable & to redeem the unredeemable.
This can be a truly amazing journey if we could but realize that He's in the footsteps of faith, rather than our apparent destination.
He's pulling for us...
He really wants us to get it...
Ah, Rick...it sounds so easy, doesn't it? Just trust God with everything, and everything will be all right, eh?
Kinda depends on your definition of "all right," though...
My struggle continues to be two-fold:
1) I trusted my life, my career, everything I knew to come here to Chicago to pursue serving God in ministry. Once I got here, the church, in essence, rejected me and hung me out to dry. I trust that God has not forsaken me - but it sure feels that way, right now (and has, for some time).
2) I thought I was following God's will for me - and a whole lotta folks affirmed that I was on the right path. Am I just hard-of-hearing? Am I that much of a con-man, to convince others that I'm on-the-beam when I'm not? How do I trust the *next* time I think I'm hearing God's will? And how do I trust that *any* decision I make isn't just self-will? My track record so far ain't so good...
Steven Curtis Chapman's famous line, "We will abandon it all/for the sake of the call," carries within it the understanding that the word "abandon" means, "It doesn't matter what happens to 'it all.' Keep or lose, succeed or fail, in prosperity or poverty - it's all God's." For me, that was OK - until the answer was "no." (Or "not yet," or "not here," or whatever that message was. Discernment is coming slowly...)
I *thought I knew how to "trust in the Lord with all your heart," but I now see I've got more than a few miles to go before that's even fractionally true. Right now, my "trust" is that God has not carried me this far to *completely* drop me on my ass - even though it feels that way, most days. For now, that level of trust is all I can muster...and I "trust" it's gonna be enough.
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