Trust

Sometimes, often-times lately, I feel so beat down by different circumstances in life. It gets exhausting at times to just try to get through that day. Even more overwhelming is the realization at times that no matter what I do, different situations with different children, do not seem to improve.

Alei just finished a book, entitled Trust by Lydia Brownback, from her College Plus advisor. I just started reading it and this was in the introduction -

"Some of us don't realize that we are trying to pull the wrong yoke. We reach toward dreams and goals designed to further God's kingdom and to bring blessing, and our prayer requests are for good things. But how do we react when things don't go according to plan? If, when our plans don't work out or our prayers aren't answered in the way or time we think best, we get frustrated and impatient and worried and fearful, that's a tip-off that something is off-kilter. All wrong views about God result in anxieties and fears about life.The health of our vertical relationship - our relationship with God - will always determine the health of our horizontal relationships - those we have with people, with life, and with ourselves. So the first thing to get straight is our view of God.

Since God overarches everything, we must view our lives and everything that happens to us through that lens. But we often don't. Instead we allow our circumstances to shape our view of God...Sometimes when we cry out in our pain, asking God to make himself known, we can't find him. He seems faraway and distant, and we conclude that he just isn't as good and kind and powerful as we had thought. Our weak faith is shaken, and we wind up distancing ourselves from God, because our own means of comfort and the people who love us seem safer."

We thought we'd been relying on God, but the truth is, we'd actually been relying on our idea of God and on what we were hoping God would do for us to make our lives happier. What we don't see is that disappointments and other difficulties that seem to threaten our faith are really blessings in disguise. They are designed by God to draw us closer to him, to enable us to see him as he really is, and to dispel our misconceptions about him and our wrong understanding of what it means to be a Christian."

I have so much to learn...