Difficult Times

Things haven't been going so well for me, at least that is how I feel anyway.  I don't like to blog when I am not doing so well, but I think I need to because I need to be open an honest about what is going on in my life.  If I only post when things are going well then I begin to paint an untrue picture of what life is like for a christian.  Life for a christian isn't perfect, it has its share of valleys, disappointments, times of feeling alone, sad, and just downright depressed.

It all started last week sometime.  I have had a run of trusting and believing and having faith that God is going to come through for me and provide a job, and now for about a week or more it has been all the opposite.  I have felt abandoned by God, I have felt like God doesn't care about me, I have felt like God is not going to take care of me.  No matter how much I read and prayed and put on the armor of God daily, I still felt like I was walking in the valley of the shadow of death.  Wondering around lost, unsure of myself, unsure of my future, and winding up in a place of feeling hopeless.  I can't compare what I am going through to what Job went through, but I have a great respect for Job for being able to stick with God while he lost everything.

It got to the point (sad to say but true) that I was ready to throw away all my books and not go back to church and basically turn my back on God.  Sunday morning I managed to listen to Charles Stanley and David Jeremiah on the TV while I was in Ellijay and all I seemed to hear was how God would bless us.  I wasn't feeling blessed with anything, I was feeling cursed, I was feeling as though God was punishing me for something.

I got back home in Carrollton around noon on Sunday and got busy with Ethan in an effort to get my mind off my troubles.  Then around 3:30pm my wife comes to me and ask if I wanted to go to church tonight.  My initial response was "no, not really", and then around 4:20 we are in the car heading to Atlanta to go to Passion City Church.   My heart was still heavy, but it began to lift a little as we sang some great songs of worship and praise to God.  The message was great, it was John 4, and the pastor did a great job of turning a story from the past into a present day story about us, about me, about how we are all the woman at the well, we all have a past.  He knows our past, present, and future sins and he still chooses to give us living water that only He can give.  During the closing song I couldn't sing, I could only stand their and listen, as warm tears rolled down my cheek I could only think about how I had been lacking trust in God.  Just like the woman at the well, God knew that about me.  I began to acknowledge/confess to God my lack of trust in Him and I began to wonder how I could doubt that the creator of the universe could do something for me.

Emotions/Feelings are part of who we are,  God gave us emotions,  but a truth that I know about my feelings is that - - Feelings are facts, (its true that I feel a certain way) but their not always true. So when I feel like God has left me (that is a fact, that I feel that way) I must remember that it is not true because His words tells us that He will never leave us or forsake us.  God loved me (and you) enough to give us His son so why would He abandoned us.  He was there all along with Job, He never left Job, but I am sure that job was feeling that way, but Job had unwavering faith even though his (so called) friends were telling him to turn his back on God.  Thank you Lord for reminding me of this and I pray that I can trust you even when my feelings are not lining up with your  facts.  Thank you Lord for friends that encourage me in the truth, these are priceless.