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What is possible is accepting his gracious invitation to trust him more in the face of our pain.
What if we believed instead of feared in the face of the unknown? What if we courageously moved through loss and disappointment, believing God has purpose for it on the other side? What if we got up every day believing God for the best, knowing we might possibly encounter the worst?
True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. TOM ROBBINS
I had
learned that we either feed fear or we feed faith, and that I had the power to choose which one I would feed. So, I fed my faith.
deliver me from this. He was going to walk me through it.
“We once heard a pastor say there was an eleventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt bash on.’
But fear is not from God, and it’s not more powerful than God. He knew it would come to steal our peace, not once or twice, but constantly throughout our lives. So, in his great mercy and faithfulness to us, God made a way for us to be more than equipped to overcome its effects and walk in faith. He gave us three offensive weapons to lean into when we’re attacked: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind”
Personally, when I don’t know what to do in a situation, I focus on how much he loves me. I remind myself that God is for me, with me, and will help me.
That’s the third weapon, which is having a sound mind. He doesn’t want us to live tormented by fear’s driving thoughts that lead to so much worry and stress. God has larger shoulders than we do, and he wants to carry our concerns for us. But we have to mentally hand them over to him. We have to cast our cares on him in prayer.5 We
We overcome, get peace, but then get hit with another unexpected blow.
Jesus spoke directly to our human tendency of fearing the unknown and worrying about the future when he said, “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? .
She understood we can step out in faith and still feel afraid.
I could just focus on the daily bread. I could believe God for the next step and quit thinking about anything else.
Yes, we resist fear, but the way we fight it is to learn from it by first facing it so it loses its paralyzing effect. We recognize it for what it is and somehow let God grow us in the midst of it. And when we do, he’ll help us get back to shore.”
If we are going to fulfill our purpose and keep on loving the adventure, then we must accept that some things will break down along the way.
When life doesn’t go our way—which it rarely does—and when our expectations lead to utter disappointment, we don’t always know how to recover our wonder of trusting God.
Holding to our faith—even in the face of deep disappointment—is critical. Making God’s promises bigger than our disappointments is essential. Getting into his Word and letting it get into us brings our hearts back to life.
Jesus began talking to them, but they could not recognize his voice.1 How many times does he speak to our hearts, yet we’re so lost in our own concerns that we cannot hear him?
Finally, they saw him in the midst of their disappointment.5 How powerful it is when we can look up and see God, even when our circumstances are ongoing.
recover our wonder. Leading us to something better ahead. He is the one who helps us remember that although the unexpected happened to us, he’ll never leave us.
To keep moving forward, we must learn to be resilient, like Sophia. We must learn to trust, like a little child. We must learn to manage our disappointments well, so we can hop on another ride full of renewed hope.
I choose to be part of the solution.
Do you see how it’s what we do with our disappointments that determines our destiny? If we don’t go through our hardships, we may move on in years, but our life stops at the point of our greatest disappointment.
Has it ever occurred to you that, if you’ll revisit your disappointment, God can give you a new perspective on it—one that can become a tool to help others?
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:3–4
You’ll never know without walking the road. There will always be hurt. You’ll be hurt if it works out, and you’ll be hurt if it doesn’t. Relationships aren’t about the end result. They’re about what I have in them for you. For both of you. I give you to each other for each other, even if only for a season. Isn’t that enough? Do you trust me with the process?”
continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. PHILIPPIANS
We choose not to avoid disappointment. Not to avoid pain. But rather to learn to manage our disappointments well, and to embrace the truth that the new adventure ahead looks different than we expected.
Disappointment is a place we pass through, not a place we stay. God wants us emotionally engaged in his purposes. Living in the moment. Fully alive. Hopeful. He wants us to let him restore our hearts, so we can keep moving forward and fulfill his good purpose for our lives. Even when people—and life—fail us.
But trying to reason through the unreasonable only leads me into an endless loop of mental searching that leads nowhere—and
I knew that I needed to deal with it, work through it, and not let it derail me.
I knew I needed to start with forgiving.
I knew I couldn’t let what happened to me become what I believed about myself. Just because someone hurt me didn’t mean I was unworthy, unlovable, or unkind.
Just because we experience failure, it doesn’t make us a failure—but that’s hard to process when we don’t know how.
How critical then to understand that even when people leave us and hurt us, God never leaves us nor forsakes us.2 He understands what it feels like to be kicked in the gut, to have the wind knocked out of us—and he cares. He promises to be there for us and to help us. “If your heart is broken,” writes the psalmist, “you’ll find God right there; if you’re kicked in the gut, he’ll help you catch your breath” (Psalm 34:18 MSG). Even when people are unfaithful, God is always faithful.
It was a defining moment in my healing, a moment of reckoning, of turning my attention from how deeply hurt I felt to how I could get better.
I’ve been on this journey long enough now to know that when I feel a certain type of heart pain, it is an invitation from God for a deeper healing he wants to do in me.
Why, God, why?—because honestly, sometimes we may never know, and because that question usually just spirals us into a dark hole that leads nowhere. Instead I started asking, Jesus, where are you in this? What can you show me through this? What can I learn from this?
He didn’t cause the hurt—my friend did—but God is always eager to use our circumstances to bring more wholeness into our lives, if we will let him.
God is good; God does good; and God uses all things for my good.4
Sometimes, when the hurt is deep, it can take longer to heal, and the relationship may never go back to how it was before. In fact, God may not even want that. But there can be peace and grace-giving communication
Jesus wants us to practice love, grace, and mercy—especially with those who wound us most, because they are often the most wounded.
I have discovered that when I hurt people (and I am devastated by my capacity to wound), it is often bec...
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a place of ignorance, fear, insecurity, or jealousy I didn’t...
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In other situations, when I felt like someone had hurt me in a manner that was illogical or irrational, I would often learn later that they had been going through their own pain, or had a wound from their past that was affecting our friendship.
When I realized their pain, I could truly understand and be more understanding. Revelations like that always turned my inwardly fixated thoughts to outwardly focused compassion for what they must be feeling, and allowed me to extend grace toward them.
How many times have we been the one who wounded someone else? How many times have we wished we could wind back time and have a do-over? Whether we are the ones who are wounded, or the ones inflicting the pain, our hearts can be just as broken and just as in need of healing.
Isn’t that what we do when we have unresolved relational wounds? We carry them from one relationship to the next.
But if we don’t invite Jesus in to heal us from the wounds of past relationships, then that’s exactly what will happen, whether we realize it or not.
