...A Brief Synopsis Of My Life So Far... (3)

I very quickly slipped off the road into the ditch and I’ve been there a long time. Long enough to have assured myself that this is normal. It isn’t, but I had myself believing that it was. Another core issue in my debacle is trust. I didn’t believe God when he said that he favours me. I didn’t believe that the picture in the mirror of me looking so radiant while standing beside God was accurate. How could it be? Look at who I am? I thought that I understood grace. I thought that I understood what it means to walk every day dependant on the strength that God provides; but I was really just standing on my own, struggling to will strength into my weary body. This lack of trust created a rift in my relationship with God, as it would with any relationship. Trust is kind of crucial if you want to maintain a healthy relationship with someone. Trust also breeds confidence. And as I’m starting to discover confidence is really important if you want to live your life to the fullest. Proverbs 3:26 says; For the Lord will be your confidence, and will keep your foot from being caught.

I have worked hard to do this on my own. I have pretended to trust God all while stubbornly refusing to take his hand and allow him to help me up. As a result I’ve tripped, stumbled and fell flat on my face. Then, because I believe God to have lead me down this path, I get angry at him for leading me where I have been hurt and where he has not been there to catch me. All of this is terribly incorrect but when your throwing a fit facts go out the window early on. Along with those facts goes the security that comes organically through the confidence that God provides. It’s like the image in the mirror. Standing next to God not only brings confidence in my abilities, but also in every aspect of who I am. I find myself content with my appearance and things like weight, hair, and clothes become inconsequential in a lot of ways. I feel grounded. I feel okay with who I am because I know who I am to God and that’s all that matters. The confidence that God gives takes the pressure off of me and places it on God. I can be confident that everything is alright because God is and always will be God. That makes him very capable of handling the things that come up in my life. That makes me okay because he’s capable of taking care of anything that comes up to challenge or to tear down my reliance on and trust in him.

I know that a lot of this is common sense, as it should be, but sometimes we become so focused on making it that common sense becomes a rare phenomenon in our situations. So it’s helpful to say it anyways. God does not give bad gifts. He gives what is good and right for our benefit. He is a very awesome God. But we in our selfishness can sometimes discredit the gifts that he gives. We deny to accept the gifts he offers believing ourselves to be acting out of pious righteousness and then suffer in our desire of the very thing he offered to us. If you are in a desert, dying for a drink of water and someone gives it to you, you don’t refuse the offering. To refuse to accept the water and die of thirst believing yourself righteous is foolish. Yet I know that I myself have done this more than once.


....................END PART THREE....................

Cole.