Trust God and Fear Not

I been led to believe lately that God allows trials in our lives so that we can trust in him.  When life is good we tend to not look to God.  When times are bad, we are quick to call on Him.  Life overall is good for me right now.  Sure there are things I would change, but in general I am blessed beyond what I deserve and life is pretty good right now. Still, I see brokenness around me.  I know people going through terrible things with family, health, addiction, and the darkness of our world.  In the midst of it all, good or bad, I have to constantly remind myself that "God is in Control".  God tells us "I AM, and you are not".  We can trust in God and he has given us the Holy Spirit so that we can  "fear not".

Related to this, I came across two things on Shannon Kelley's Blog today (http://www.shannon-kelley.com/blog/)
The first is what struck me as a great way to approach God and our relationship with him:

I’m a weirdo Christian. I have never fit too nicely in the traditional American church. Maybe because I make people uncomfortable-who knows. Because the reality is that I didn’t learn about God in a building doing crafts in the basement-I learned about God by watching Him provide for my family, by watching miracles happen in the Phillipines and China, by sitting under a mango tree listening to stories from the Bible read as if you were there. It’s the same way I feel about astronomy-I didn’t sit and learn how the stars were placed, I went and took walks on the beach at night with my dad when I was 11 and saw them as he pointed out the constellations. I felt the power of millions of stars staring at you in a place where there was no electricity. I didn’t need to look in a book to learn about them, I felt it, they were real to me, they moved me, they gave me childlike wonder. To this day, I stop in awe under a ceiling full of stars. 

That is what God is to me. He isn’t something I learned- He is someone I know that is real to me. I feel him. He is real to me. He moves me. He gives me childlike wonder. 

The second  came from a Jesus Calling devotion that she referenced:

“Instead of floundering in the past, release your mistakes to Me. Look to Me in trust, anticipating that My infinite creativity can weave both good choices and bad into a lovely design. Because you are human, you will continue to make mistakes. Thinking that you should live an error-free life is symptomatic of pride. Your failures can be a source of blessing, humbling you and giving you empathy for other people in their weaknesses. Best of all, failure highlights your dependence on Me. I am able to bring beauty out of the morass of your mistakes. Trust me, and watch to see what I will do.” 

 Both point back to our dependence on God and trust in him.  I read another place today about the woman who was plagued with bleeding for 12 years and believed that if she could just touch Jesus' robe, she would be healed (Matthew 9:20-22).  She trusted God and was healed because of her faith.  It was pointed out though that to reach out for Jesus' robe, the lady had to open her arms.  If we keep our arms to our chest we can maintain our privacy and hold in our shame, our guilt, our imperfection; but we can't draw on the power of Jesus.  Holding our arms to our chest maintains our false front of perfection that we put up for those around us, but it keeps those with whom we are in community from helping us through our problems and bringing us back to the grace of God.  This gets back to pride, which judging from how it keeps coming up, will probably be a topic of a future post.