Sometimes when we are hurting, not understanding why we are suffering loss, why bad things are happening to us, the most important thing we can do is to trust God. To say, "just trust God" seems too simplistic---one of those churchy answers that just doesn't help. How can we simply start trusting God in the midst of our loss?
Steve Cloud, speaking at my church Sunday, said the more you know God, the more you'll love God. The more you love God, the more you'll trust God. That's the secret! Right now begin to seek to know God. Scripture promises that if you seek God, He will be found by you (I Chronicles 28:9). One of my favorite verses for knowing God is His promise in Jeremiah 29:12-13: "You will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord." God is always there ready to listen to us, if we will just seek Him with all our heart. He's ready to listen to you also. What verses has God given you to help you know Him better? How has God spoken to you in difficult times? We would love to hear about it.
During our first full-time ministry position, we started noticing our pastor acting strangely. Here we were: young, inexperienced and eight hours from the only home we ever knew. He would call my young husband into his office and curse him. He came up behind my girlfriend while we were getting the Wednesday night meal together and bit her ear. Let's just say the women started to avoid him. As his mental illness got worse people started leaving our church until finally even the deacons left. We stopped getting paid. We had two small children and we were down to a single can of soup. Several churches extended calls to us, but we never felt God releasing us from the present church. As I cried out to God He lead me Corinthians 8-10.
ReplyDelete"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; stuck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body."
The next day we had groceries in the front seat of our car. I had enough to be able to help another family who lived across the street with food. A week or so after that, we received a call from a church in the Panhandle of Texas. It seems my husband's resume just happened to wind up on his desk when he came back from lunch. No one knew where it came from, but I do. God works in mysterious way, and I, as a young mother and wife took notice of that.