Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.Proverbs 3:5
Graham says in Growing Up in God that, “Everything comes down from God, to God and through God. Everything comes to us as a gift from God. There’s nothing to earn, no performance needed. You do nothing to enter into it.”
So why does it often feel like we have to strive to enter into that place?
Because our performance-based thinking tells us that we need to strive to get into relationship with God instead of realizing that getting into relationship with God is a given. We develop tunnel vision that causes us to keep focusing on the wrong thing.
The only thing we need to give our attention to is staying in relationship with God, choosing to abide. But in order to do that, we must trust Him completely with everything we have. We have to trust that every problem is attached to a much greater provision and that every time something doesn’t go according to the way we planned it, that things are going exactly as He planned them.
God is the promise-giver, not the problem-solver. If we encounter a problem and immediately rush into prayer for a solution to the problem, we are missing out on an opportunity to see something that God is showing us. We are missing out on an opportunity for conversation, and a chance to grow. God only puts problems before us so that we can grow from them; He is never cruel, never malicious, and He wants you to have faith that He has something so much better planned for you.
When we are traumatized, careful, and guarded, we stay in the place of logic and rationalization, because we know it is safe there. If we can plot out our life from Point A to Point B with no variables in between there is a sense of comfort we feel in it. Nothing can go wrong, but also, we never get to find out if our lives could be even better than we ever hoped for. As soon as we step away from planning and logic and begin to walk next to Him, knowing that He will let us know when we veer off course, an entire new world opens up: the difference between being comfortable and being with the Comforter.
This is the importance of having child-like faith. Children are not victim to logic, they are not concerned that their parents would let them fail or suffer. Children are not going to argue the outcome based on reasoning, and God wants us to be like that, to trust that as our Father He is always looking out for us, always available to us.
In Growing Up in God, Graham says,
Jesus deliberately links greatness in the Kingdom with the personality of a Beloved child. Children can access anything through their imagination, through their dreams, through their simple belief, simple trust, and faith.
Children have an incredible capacity to forgive and forget. When something hurts them, they pick themselves up and keep on going; they aren’t guarded or concerned that it might happen again. Children aren’t blinded by their traumas and that’s what God wants for us too. He wants us to possess a child-like faith so strong that we aren’t afraid to move forward because of what happened to us in the past. He wants us to trust that He will never let us fall without being there to pick us up, dust us off and show us the better way. He wants us to step into love and stay there.
–Sarah at Team Brilliant
