Fraudulent: Part I

Happy Saturday, everyone. I hope this blog post finds you each doing very well. Hopefully at peace with where you are at in life and where God has decided for you to be circumstantially in this very moment. Because wherever you are now is right where He knew you were going to be since the very beginning of time. And if you find yourself not at peace, well, know that you are in good company, because I find myself going back and forth about having a peace with where I am at in life currently. I'll go to bed thankful and trusting that tomorrow will be a new day, full of God's mercies, and then I'll wake up the next day full of dread and fear and hopelessness. How does that happen? That's probably why I prefer to stay sleeping:) As I awoke today, the feelings of inadequacy, fear, failure, deep loss, regret, hopelessness, (you name the most dreadful of words and I'm sure I felt it;)). I want to be honest, I knew that these feelings needed to be dealt with in order for my day to not be wasted (because Lord knows I have allowed to many days to be wasted because I've allowed these feelings to rule my day vs. allowing God's promises to rule my day). So, I turned to God. I opened up His word and begged the Holy Spirit to offer me some peace-ANY peace...a small morsel would do-but for heaven's sake offer me something! So, I turned to a beloved verse offered to me during my time at Northwestern College. It's the passage found in Romans 5:3-5: "More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." Beautiful, huh? Well, I wasn't really feeling the beauty of that too much to be honest. I said to myself, "Oh great, suffering. I have to suffer first, which only brings me endurance, which will bring character and THEN I get to the hope. Yet another process to receiving a peace that I so desperately want NoW!" Honest, folks. I am being so brutally honest with all of you today and how I'm feeling right now, but why not be real. I continued to read by going over the proceeding chapter. Romans 4. To sum this up, FAITH is a big deal and Abraham, he had it! And as I read about faith (a word we as Christians readily embrace but I will beg if we truly know how to live it out). We (and I'm pointing the hardest at myself when I say "we") as Christians say, "Oh yeah, I have faith. I believe in God and Jesus for sure. I have a super strong and deep faith." Ok. I'll give ya that...and I hope that is the case, because honestly, in these past few weeks of full-on "suffering", I gotta tell ya, I've had to question how "deep" and "strong" my faith in God has been. Who we are and our character reveals itself in the dark days, not the light ones. When he's asked me to give up particular dreams/ hopes/comforts, with my mouth I've said, "Oh, sure. I'll do that.Right away, God. Because I trust you for sure." But it has taken me MONTHS to actually DO the very thing God asked me to do. And as of late, God has ripped from me something that I have deemed so important and almost part of me. This thing...oh,ooooo, I was sooo mad at God for taking this from me and making me give this up after I've been "so faithful" to him. I chuckle at myself sometimes and imagine how funny I must sound to God when he hears me say, "BUT I'VE BEEN SO FAITHFUL AND I DESERVE THIS! YOU CAN'T TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME, I'VE EARNED IT BY BEING FAITHFUL TO YOU!" What a little brat I can be sometimes. He's showing me right now just how faithful I've been to Him and let me tell ya folks, it's pretty pathetic. So, that is why I have titled my post today, "FRAUDULENT" because that I what I have been when it comes to my faith in God. And I call myself this because it is in the "storms of life" where out faith's strength is revealed, and during this "storm" in my life, my faith is really really fake. I'm uncomfortably faced with the fact that I do not have faith like Abraham. Not. One. Bit. You see, Abraham was asked to leave his home for God, and later in life, after he and his wife Sarah waited years and years and years for a son and finally got one, God asked Abraham to even sacrifice his only son. This son he had truly been FAITHFUL to God to be given. Ha, if anyone had a right to shout out God about how "faithful" they had been, it would have been Abraham. But even in the midst of these difficult requests from God, we see Abraham obeys and trusts God enough to do that very thing that he had been asked to do (move into a foreign land and sacrifice his only son Issac). And that is why Abraham is known as a man of great faith. And that is why he was blessed as having his offspring be more numerable than the stars in the sky. But not to toot Abraham's horn too much because his faith reflects the greatness of who God is and what he wants to give those who have faith in Him. He wants to give them all that is good which is solely Himself. Faith, without a doubt, will sometimes mean suffering...and it's not like we weren't warned of this. We were. But when we stepped into the faith, we weren't doing it blindly, but because something in us stirred that there was something magnificently great about stepping into this faith. Something out of this world and amazing. It's like when we start a workout program, we know that the promises of working out are amazing. But it's when we are physically suffering to created muscle that will get us to our end amazing-ness, that I'm sure we question if doing the workout program was a good idea. Now, comparing eternal life to that of a workout program is cheap, but you understand what I'm trying to say. So, stepping into this faith and the suffering that it may bring to us, we know that suffering is not the end; rather the end is a promise of God's infinite love being poured into our hearts and the gift of the Holy Spirit who comforts those in the midst of the suffering (Romans 5). And that's what's getting me through this time: God's love and the promise of the Holy Spirit. I'm praying that during these difficult days, that my faith in God be made authentic and grow, because my faith is not looking too hott right now and without my faith in God, I have nothing in this world. Honestly. And I want faith so that I can embrace this horrid suffering and stay the course because I want receive Him who is more than I could ever hope for or ask for in this life. His promises are eternal and good and beautiful (I'm trying SOOO hard right now to just even say these words) and I know this...but it's one thing to know, and an entirely another thing to live it out. If I ask, I know God will give me the strength to stop being fraudulent in my faith and help me to be an authentic woman known with a strong faith. My next post is going to be a good one. It's going to be hopeful one that talks about just how beautiful God's promises are when it comes to him giving us faith. Hint:Jesus. But that's all I'm gonna say. Know that wherever you are at, I'm praying for you to be given strength and hope and to feel the presence of God in your day.