Stepping out before you know how it all turns out—that’s what faith is all about. But many Christians embrace the false notion that it should be easy, or at least simple. And if it’s not, God isn’t in it.
But when we look at Scripture, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there is one thing we know we will encounter every time we change direction in life—resistance.
It’s been called the green monster. Invidia in the Latin texts. A deadly sin. And a common one. Envy.
I confess to falling for it at times. Far too many times. No matter how much success I experience, it’s never enough.
The book launch could have been bigger—like hers. The traffic could be higher—like his. The number of speaking engagements could be more—and so it goes. More. Always more.
As we strolled through our neighborhood last night, my wife and I noted features we liked about other houses, and I felt envy creeping in again—even though we have a beautiful home with more room than we’ve ever had before.
Envy, you see, is not rational. It doesn’t make sense when we think about it. But then we usually don’t think about it. We just go with the feeling and end up in a bad place.
But usually by the end of each day we’ve encountered more than a few people who appear to be enjoying success. More than we’re having, at least.
And that’s all it takes. We see it and we want it for ourselves.
Ever feel alone? Jesus did, too. That’s right. Messiah. Creator. Savior of the world. Even he dealt with loneliness. After all, one of the reasons he became one of us was to understand what we go through each day on this terrestrial ball. But unlike us, Jesus refused to give in to the temptation to fixate on that feeling.
How did he beat it? Jesus beat loneliness by speaking the truth to himself.
It matters greatly how we talk to ourselves. Let’s face it, we are the one person we can never get away form—no matter how hard we might try at times. So what we say to ourselves is critical when we are tempted to feel alone.
It happened at least once to Jesus, most noticeably as he gave his disciples a final briefing just prior to his crucifixion.
None of us like having our faith tested. Yet when hard times hit us, we cry out to God—and that’s a good thing. We have no choice but to trust Him more when life spirals out of our control. When tough stuff happens, we more clearly see our need to depend on God. It seems that our faith grows the most when life gives us its worst.
On my journey as FaithWalker, I have discovered this reality: the only thing harder than trusting God when you have nothing, is trusting God when you have something. When we stepped out to answer God’s call, and faced a mortgage payment due in three days with no way to pay, we had no choice but to trust God. When we had six children to feed with almost no income for nearly a year, we had to trust God to give us food.
But when we came out on the other side of that transition and began to be blessed with ways to meet the needs ourselves, our faith didn’t seem quite so necessary. Key word: seem. From God’s perspective, nothing had changed, but from our perspective, we no longer needed to trust God for our next meal or mortgage payment.
We’ve all had a bad day. I’m not talking about the days when we get hit with bad news like an unexpected diagnosis or are involved in an automobile accident.
Those are not pleasant either.
I’m talking about those really bad days when it seems every hope and dream we ever had just gets sucked right out of us. They fly away and leave us despondent, depressed, and wishing we had never gotten out of bed in the first place.
And the worst part is that we usually feel as if we’re standing by helplessly, watching the day spiral from bad to worse. And every minute we do nothing, we feel guilty – which only makes the day worse.
That scenario has happened to me more times than I’d like to admit. Just recently I experienced a wonderful weekend, full of family blessings and hope for the future. I entered Monday excited about my upcoming book launch and full of ideas on how to help Christians think, live, and lead an authentic life.
And then – Boom! Gone. And I felt as if I were imprisoned within myself, watching the day go up in flames while I sat on the fire extinguisher whining to myself about why the day sucked. And hating myself for doing nothing.
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