Faith

My faith has been tested in recent months, not by anything earth shattering like life or death, but by nevertheless significant issues such as financial strain and pregnancy with an unexpected third child while my youngest is not yet a year. So I've been giving faith a lot of thought. A couple of months ago I was tackling these worries on my own, making myself physically and emotionally ill, laying awake nights (late, late nights), not being of any real benefit to my spouse, children, or probably others who know me. And then I had a middle-of-the-night experience where God entered the room with me and sat on that rumpled mess of a tossed and turned-through bed and poignantly confronted me with this thought: "You either trust me or you don't". I stand convicted. See, I had been picking and choosing where I could depend on God with my life. The things that were easy to let go of He could have, and the things that were huge and rocking my world I preferred to hold onto and nurse into a writhing mass of boiling worry. Immediately as I accepted this truth of the Lord's, I felt my hold on these things in my life loosen and give way. Because I do trust Him - I want and need to trust Him.

I see our faith journey hit three different stages:
We take our first step of faith, trusting God with our lives and giving them over to Him. Then accepting that "faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Heb. 11:1 Doesn't that sum up the Christian faith? We are constantly battling the hopelessness and seen "sureties" of this world against our very real but unseen almighty God. And what is our ultimate hope? That God is on the throne - he is holy, loving, and in control.
As we work to live out this faith, it should permeate EVERY area of our lives - ALL circumstances. In my life the verse that best sums up this part of the journey is Philippians 4:6 - "Do not be anxious about anything but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." As one who has faith in the Lord, anxiety should not be part of my vocabulary. Rather, trusting Him through prayer and beyond that, giving thanks, should be my M.O. This is where the rubber meets the road - day in and day out, do I trust Him or do I succumb to my anxiety? Do I exalt him with thanksgiving or nurse my wounds?
Finally, I believe that through acting on this faith through thankful prayer, our eyes are opened to the fact that "God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline" (1 Tim. 1:7). That has become my mantra in stressful or anxious times, or times when I am losing my temper or unhappy with life's circumstances, etc. etc. God has NOT given me a spirit of fear/timidity but of POWER to combat the devil and this world's schemes, and of LOVE for those around me, and of SELF-DISCIPLINE to spiritually grow into the woman God desires for me.

So as those verses and steps of the journey have been unfolded for me, I thank God that He loves me enough to pull me up out of the quagmire of my own mind and plant me on the firmer ground of His word.