I was thinking this morning about what it means to trust God. We say that alot and many of us believe it’s the right direction to be headed, but what does it really mean? What does it feel and look like to truly give yourself up and rely on God? These are questions I’ve really had to get to the bottom of in my own life because for a very long time it just didn’t click. I was in a lot of pain for a lot of years and I knew that I needed to “Let go and let God” but there was a disconnect when it came to applying it to my life. Not because I didn’t want to; I wanted a miracle with everything I had. But rather, it was because I had never been at a point where I really needed to.
I was in misery for many, many years and there was no doubt that I wanted to change my situation. In fact, over and over I would surrender my circumstances to God and begged Him to relieve me, rescue me and teach me. The thing is, I was so hurt, beat up and bruised that I would almost immediately take my junk back when there wasn’t an instant solution, when the warm fuzzies of trusting God faded. It wasn’t something I consciously decided to do, it was a response that was so deeply embedded in me that it was automatic. When the answer didn’t come fast enough or look like what I thought it should, I took it back and began making decisions for myself again. Decisions about how to lose weight, how to be healthy, how to be who I was created to be. In taking these things back, I didn’t realize what I was doing was taking the power away from God.
When it came down to it, when I felt abandoned and hopeless, when I questioned where God was, why He wasn’t saving me like I knew He could, I realized later it was because I didn’t allow Him to. I put Him in a box and resolved that if the solution to my problems didn’t look the way I thought it should then I would take it back and start doing it on my own again.
Shame on me. Shame on me for thinking He would ever abandon me simply because His solution didn’t look like what I expected. Shame on me for thinking that miracles needed to happen overnight to be life-changing. Shame on me for not fully trusting God with everything I had.
Now that I’ve crossed that line where I have learned to trust God with my entire life and I’m continuing to work on learning how to not take back the burdens I’ve laid at His feet, I’ve learned that He is so much more creative than me. He is more of an adventurer than me and has a much better plan for my life than even I do.
I was thinking this morning about how all that may be similar to firefighters. We know what firefighters are and that they can save us from danger, but something really big will change in us once we find ourselves in a fire and need to rely on them with our lives. There’s a deepening of respect, of admiration and trust.
I found myself in a fire with God. I was at a point where there simply wasn’t a way out and I either needed to give up my life and trust or be held captive forever. That was a decision that was more than 15 years in the making but something changed in me, a switch was flipped and things started to fall into place. For the first time in my life, I was set on a path to learn what it was like to fully trust, fully love and fully surrender. The other side of that, the life full of trusting and surrendering, is pure freedom, pure joy and pure love that I didn’t even know was possible. I am truly changed and have learned to trust Him with my entire life. The result is more fun and more joy that fulfills my soul and is helping me to finally become the person He intended.
