Trust...

I had an entire post on trust and I accidentally deleted it... guess I can't trust my own fingers!

The basic idea of the post was the possibility of never being able to trust.

As a child I was raised in a country that was foreign to my parents.  Therefore I grew up hearing a lot of "dont trust anything the people here." And things along that line.

So I found it hard to trust anyone that didnt look like me.

When I moved here, one of the people who looked like me, violated my trust.  Talk about irony, ha!

So I lived a life of trusting very few people often the list didnt include even myself.

Then I noticed something as I became a bit more mature in my walk with Jesus.

I tend to place my trust issues on God.  I equate God and the humans around me.  As a believer in Christ and the Almighty God, that sounds absurd, I know.  Its also sadly the truth for so many of us.

I heard a sermon by Francis Chan just the other day where he mentioned this very fact.  When we are looking for God's will for our lives, we tend to forget that He is faithful and He is trustworthy.  So why is it so hard to believe that God will come through when we are at a crossroads?

I speak for myself only when I say its because I transfer the faults of the human race to the qualities of God.  Is this something you deal with in your daily walk?

I pray that this is something I will intentionally fight and something that you will fight in our lives.

If we are going to claim that we believe in all of God's attributes then we must believe that above all He is trustworthy since thus far, He has done all the things He had promised.

Love God and the rest will follow...

When the trust runs out...

I have been thinking about the level of trust and does it ever end its course with certain people?

The phrase "Trust me!" is used and over used if you ask me. If trust has a starting point then it has to have a point when it stops, right?

I dont trust people very easily so maybe this topic is more than just a topic to me.  Where does my distrust for humanity come from?

My childhood involved a lot of "dont talk to anyone,  cant trust people in this country..." because I grew up in a country that was not native to my parents. They were safeguarding their daughter, I get it.

Then the invasion of my childhood home by a crazed man further fueled my distrust of unknown people.

But it threw me for a loop when I moved to America and one of our own native people violated my trust. Ha! Irony, gotta love it.

Then things like 9/11 and most recently the Boston marathon bombing happen and the distrust of people around me continues to grow. Now, everyone could be "the bad guy" and I know I know that a lot of these same folks look at me and think I am not to be trusted.

I know utopia was never truth on Earth and never will be but is it just me or this worse than ever? I mean what's a world where you cant even believe the words that your own sibling is saying to you?

The worst part? I project all this on to God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit.

God is the only one who has sacrificed His own life to show His trust worthiness and I find it hard to trust Him. The worst part? He continues to love me through it all. 

I wake up every morning with the same thought,  "I can't believe You loved me through last night and are letting me see this morning."  He trusts me to lean on Him and proclaim Him so why dont I trust Him back for His plans and His timing? What carries me through even when I dont trust him?

Grace... its His grace that carries me from one distrusting moment to the next.

The truth of the matter is that even in my distrust He shows His trust in me because He can. Because He is God and because well... my other option is eternal damnation and He is merciful enough not to let me go through that.

Will He correct me? Will He redirect my path? Well of course! He is a Just God too! If I was just swimming in grace and mercy I would not know true Love. 

At the end of it all, I put my trust in one thing only and that's God. His provisions, grace, love, justice and mercy!

Sometimes I wonder where is the cut off? When does God say, I dont trust you anymore? Will he say that? Why do I say it all the time? To him or to other people?

If I can stop trusting people, can God stop trusting me? For my sake, I pray I never find out!

Love God and the rest will follow!

Lies are from...

Where did the urge come from?

If you are Christian,  it came from the serpent coaxing Eve to eat the fruit.

If you are human, it seems to always be the easy way out.

If you are Indian,  its how you save your pride which mostly comes from, the fear that you arent good enough.

For me? I cant wrap my head around this need to hide things or lie.  I lived a lie for a long time, a lie that I was a good Christian...

I believed the whole time. Well even that is a lie. I doubted the existence of this Supreme Creator God.

I pretended to br interested but guess what, He called me to him.  MULTIPLE times.   My first encounter,  in 11th grade.  My second,  in college. And they few and far between and I thought that was normal and the way things worked with God.

In the last 6-7 yrs, I have come to learn its more like a moment to moment thing.  God speaks, we just have to be in tune to hear at all times.  He is working constantly, He wants us to know that, be aware of the reality of that.

Some of us live life as if no one is watching.  As long as we project on the outside what we want the world to see then we dont have to deal with the reality of what's happening on the inside. 

That's a lie!

God will bring it to the light.  He brought my fear of being alone out for me to deal with in front of the world.  He brought my urge to tell white lies out in the open.  He brought my fears out.  He brought my inability to trust to test last October.  Why? So that I am aware that He knows and also because He cares that I am overcoming these and not getting bogged down by them.

My Father in Heaven, break your children Lord! Break every chain that ties us down.

Love God and the rest will follow...

Over done?

This morning my reading had a bit of Job's story as a reference. That man had it all taken away and he was made to suffer throughout with boils.

Overdone?

My friend and I made a soup and it sat in the crockpot a little longer than it should have so it turned more into a chili than soup.

Overdone?

People killing each other, forcing authorities to place entire cities on lockdown.

Overdone?

This is the world we live in. Sometimes it doesn't quite make sense in the here and now but in hindsight it will.

For all the three scenarios above, my answer is NO!

Job's story had a beauty of its own. All of his experiences gave each one of us a story and an example to look to about perseverance and humility and long-suffering.   Most of all, Job never stopped trusting in God.  Through it all, God was still Job's ally.

The soup that turned to chili? Something comforting in a hearty chili on a cold and rainy night.  The spices were just right and the entire dish pulled itself together while cooking. Beauty that initially I might have refused to see, now is more than evident. Why? Because I changed my perspective. Praise Jesus it is edible, right? In this case its edible and comforting.

As for the lockdown?  Authorities are completely in the right.  Those heartless people who have gone on this rampage? Utterly insane! The authorities who have to put their lives on the line? Heroic beyond words. Who wins? Who loses? At the end of the day, I want to venture to say, everyone loses a part of their peace,  a part of their sanity and part of their feeling of safety.  New Yorkers will never return to the same place they were at before 9/11 but they have fought through it and Boston will do the same. In the long run, if even one person comes to know Jesus as his/her Lord and Savior then some good came of it all. Personally,  I would want another means to bring people to Jesus, but God uses all means.

In the end of it all, I see how we can take something that makes no sense, that seems overdone and turn it around for the better.

One thing I know for sure,  Jesus is never overdone.  He is never out of line or out of style.  God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit will always be reliable, accountable and most of all The Truth.

Love God and the rest will follow...

Rest...

Been a while, it almost became a chore to remember to log in and do this.  The thing is... I was really miserable at certain points and knew that if only I wrote my thoughts out then I would be able to process all that was running around in my brain. And somehow I still didnt do it, just chose to wallow instead. Not. Heatlhy.

A few days ago I had this feeling again so I decided to get the app on my phone.  This way I have no excuse for not blogging anymore.  Coincidentally, I got a text from Jyo the same day, that said "you should start a blog" that's when I realized that the youngens in my life didn't even know that side of me.

Had that girl died out while maneuvering around the paths of this life?

Why didnt I feel like I had a moment of rest when it came to my thoughts recently?

Then talking to one of my sisters this morning I was reminded that the idea of rest is something we tend to take for granted in the world we live in.

We are reminded of the need for rest even in the creation story when our Creator took the seventh day to rest.

Why then, as humans, do we not see the need for it? And why are some of us not blessed with the ability to rest?  Even when we want the body to rest, our minds are bombarded. These days with so much available to us via the internet on our phones and tablets and tv and computers, its a miracle we even blink.

The idea of rest is necessary on so many levels.  Our bodies, physically need to rest the muscles and every system has a need to rejuvenate while at rest.
Mentally we need rest from thoughts and things being bombarded at us.  Meditation is a popular way to "unwind" for this very reason. It brings clarity to decisions we might be pondering over.
Our soul needs rest from being teased by the world all the time. Most important of all, our spirit needs rest so that Jesus can mend and heal what He needs to in our soul.

We have convinced ourselves that life xan be lived without rest, without healing and worst of all without Jesus.

We need Jesus for he is the one who said,

"Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."
- Matthew 11:28 NASB

So we must learn to find our rest in Jesus "who will all our sorrows share."

Love God and the rest will follow...