Trusting God through the Highs and Lows

AN UPHILL BATTLE

Fighting the good fight is always an uphill battle, no matter what your story is. There are always good times and bad times. Even on days when it’s not raining, the sun’s heat can be sweltering. One has to take life on this earth with a grain of salt. Or, in a twist of irony, one could be the salt of this earth. And, as Christians, we are called to be just that. 

            However, how can you act like salt when you feel like dirt? And how long can you go on trusting God when he doesn’t seem to care about your feelings? How can you concentrate on others when your basic emotional needs aren’t being met? When the climb isn’t only uphill, it’s completely vertical? 

EPIDEMICALLY SPEAKING 

            Emotional instability is becoming an epidemic in our society, and especially in our young people. Approximately 1 in 5 youth aged 13–18 (21.4%) experiences a severe mental disorder at some point during their life¹. 6.9% of young adults in the U.S.—16 million—had at least one major depressive episode², and mood disorders, including major depression, dysthymic disorder and bipolar disorder, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, are the third most common cause of hospitalization in the U.S. for both youth and adults aged 18–44³. In an age where minds are constantly being bombarded with worldly messages, it isn’t a far cry to believe that mental health has plummeted in recent decades. 

            This spike of emotional instability has created a need for professionals who know the mind inside and out, and the psychiatrists and therapists of the world did not disappoint. Secular specialists have come out of the woodwork to grind the poor minds of these searching souls, molding them like so much putty, but the results have not changed significantly enough to determine whether or not their treatment is working. Even so, Christians with mental health issues still take their troubles to the worldly shrinks. Why is this? 

            For anyone suffering from depression, anxiety, or other emotional or mental health issues, the world is a bleak one. But for a Christian, the struggle is augmented by the confusion of wanting to be right with the Lord while still being unable to control the emotions that well up from deep within. Many Christians feel ashamed of their feelings and do not want to share them with Christian counselors for fear they will say one of two things: either, that they are sinning by dwelling on their "passions of the flesh", or that they are faking their feelings for attention. Neither option sounds like the truth, so the fading Christian turns to the only other option available to them: the secular therapist, who will invariably lead them astray. 

THIS WORLD OF GRAY

            I know this because I have lived this lie. For far too long, I was the one sitting in the pew, watching smiling church-goers sing about the joy of the Lord while my world was shadowy and gray. I didn’t know why. All I wanted was for God to take away my bitterness, my loneliness, my numbness. I prayed but I felt like my prayers didn’t get as far as the ceiling. I read my Bible every day, striving for the connection I had once felt with my Lord, but I felt nothing. I began to think that maybe, just maybe, God had decided that I wasn’t worth His time. I began to descend a downward spiral. 

            I began to lose hope. 

            Until one day, someone told me something completely life-changing. “You may not be able to choose your feelings right now, but you can choose to trust God, even if you don’t feel Him close by.”  

            Isaiah 26: 3-4 says this about trust: “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal.” Trust is a choice, friends. And even though trusting God through depression or mental illness feels like clinging to a rock while being tossed by a sea storm in the ghost-black darkness, that Rock will never falter. You just have to choose to cling to it. 

TRUST IS WORTH IT

            Sure, it’s still a challenge. Life is all uphill, from the moment we’re born until we meet Jesus at the pearly gates. But God is there, whether we are on the mountains of life, or crawling through the valleys. Tauren Wells's song Hills and Valleys is always an encouragement to me, because God is the one who put me on the high places, and he will not leave me in the low places. Getting up, getting dressed, and going about each day will still be hard, but it will be worth it, and one day, you’ll wake up and find that life is a little bit easier. Don’t seek the help you need through secular mental health professionals. Find someone who can keep you accountable, who can encourage you, and who can remind you of that Rock when you have lost sight of it. God does care about your feelings. 

You, fellow Christians, have not “lost your saltiness” (Matthew 5:13-16) just because you are in a low spot right now. Get help. There are many Christian help lines who will see these diseases for what they are and not make them into something they are not. 
Choose to trust. 
Choose to hope. 
Choose to live. 

             

Citations 

1.    Any Disorder Among Children. (n.d.) Retrieved August 14, 2017, from http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/any-disorder-among-children.shtml

2.    Major Depression Among Adults. (n.d.). Retrieved August 14, 2017 from http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/major-depression-among-adults.shtml

3.   Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, The Department of Health & Human Services. (2009). HCUP Facts and Figures: Statistics on Hospital-based Care in the United States, 2009. Retrieved August 14, 2017, from http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/factsandfigures/2009/pdfs/FF_report_2009.pdf

I Hope You Worship

What is Worship?

Most everyone is familiar with the term "worship". To some, the word conjures up images of believers falling on their faces, moaning to whatever deity they adhere to - to others, the word means simple songs, sung from the heart - and to still others, the word is ambiguous in nature, floating around an ideal they cannot imagine or describe.

Growing up in a Christian household in which we regularly attended our Baptist church, worship, to me, was music. My father, uncle, aunts and grandfather were all musically talented and involved in leading the church's morning songs, so the term "worship" became synonymous in my mind with my father's clear, loud voice and my aunts pretty a capella harmony. I took to heart verses like Psalm 108:1: "My heart, O Lord, is steadfast; I will sing and make music with all my soul." (NIV) However, verses like Psalm 96:9 ("O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.") (KJV) were foreign and odd to me.

What, I wondered, is true worship?

What i realized is this: true worship is not defined by importance. True worship is defined by priority. It is a matter of the heart. If we place highest priority on who God is and live out that dedication in our everyday lives, each action will be worship. It is more than music. It is more than witnessing. It is more than tithing. Worship is submitting to God's perfection and His will and placing all our burdens on Him, trusting even when it feels foolish, loving even when it hurts. Worship is the actions, but it is the meaning behind the actions. A worship-filled lifestyle will express the "beauty of holiness" through a love for God that cannot help but seep from within into everything we do.

Why Do We Worship? 

The Purpose of Worship

We worship God because he is God. That is the only reason. He is the only God who deserves our utmost respect, love, and, yes, fear. We worship Him because he is all-knowing. We worship Him because he is perfect. But we worship God primarily because He loved us first. If you think about it, knowing and believing this one fundamental truth will cause all other forms of worship to flow easily and from the heart. The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent Creator God loved us and loves us still, and will always love us. He will always be there and he saved us when we deserved nothing but loneliness, desperation and separation from Him. We must focus our worship - our music, our actions, and our thoughts - on the worthiness of God. 

The Promise of Worship

God is infinitely generous. Though we deserve nothing, God chooses to respond to our worship and promises to commune with us. He does not promise to make us feel good or even to lift our burdens immediately, but He promises that He will be there. Imagine, personal communion with the Creator, Redeemer. From beyond the social, beyond the metaphysical, beyond the borders of our mind, God comes, in His own time, as a response to our worship. Psalm 16:7 says "I will bless the Lord who has counseled me..." It is a circular concept, a symbiotic relationship, as it were: if we are living in submission to God's will and bless him through our lives, He will counsel and commune with His children. He sends the Holy Spirit (John 14:16) to be with us through our worship and our troubles alike. To me, this is one of the most amazing, mind-boggling concepts in Scripture. 

To say it plainly, while we are worshiping God, he is inspecting our hearts. Anything else that we expect worship to bring is null if we do not let God first access our innermost thoughts, our soul, the whole of our beings. As Delesslyn Kennebrew from Christianity Today says, our hearts must be right with God in order for true worship to be beneficial. When we worship, we are asking God to make us more and more like him and to weed out anything in us that isn't. That is the true promise of worship: because he will reveal anything that is not like Him in our lives, we can be slowly and painstakingly transformed into His likeness. 

"The other benefits that we tend to expect because we lift up our feeble hands and shout with our weak voices are worthless if our hearts are not right with God. My sisters and brothers, when we offer God our true worship, we are inviting him to inspect our hearts for anything that is not like him." ~ Delesslyn A. Kennebrew, Christianity Today 

Worship is submitting to God's perfection and His will and placing all our burdens on Him. If you are are not living a life in submission to God's will, then I invite you to make worship a non-negotiable priority in your life. Through singing, declaring, and giving, you will be able to give God the glory that he so deserves (Psalm 96:8). God promises that He will commune with you through worship, but above all, He promises to make your heart more like His. If there is anything that is worthy of emulation, it is God's heart, and though it will take a lifetime, He promises to help hone you so that you are more and more pleasing to Him.

I Hope You Know You are Useful

 

My dear friends:

In the immortal words of the Beatles- "It's been a long, cold, lonely winter." Seriously, this winter has felt longer, colder and lonelier to me than all others in my (short, relatively-speaking) life. I've been busy. I can't believe the winter is almost over and I haven't posted a single article! My humblest apologies.

When the winter drags on and seems to dump foot after foot of snow on my efforts to uplift, I begin to feel insecure. I might even being to complain. Short, dark days lead to short tempers and sicknesses and that might lead to a falling-away from God. Sometimes I can get so bogged down by the cold winter months that I forget to thank God for my blessings. After all, Thanksgiving was months ago and I took care of it all then, right? When I don't praise God for what He has given me, I can get distracted by what He hasn't.

It is a truth universally accepted among Christians that God has gifted each of us with something that can and ought to be used to benefit the church. We all have talents, great or small. Still, many of us struggle with feelings of inadequacy - the feeling that we are not good enough, that we will never be good enough, that we have not been properly equipped for the task set before us. The feeling that we are useless.

This, quite frankly, is untrue.

God made this real for me recently when I was impromptu "counseling" a younger person on her own feelings of inadequacy. Why, she asked me, did God make her so imperfect? Why did she annoy other people? Why wasn't she good enough? Why? Why? And I was forced to confront my own insecurities and acknowledge that I, too, had for some time been comparing myself to others.

But that's just it. In comparing myself to others, I had taken for granted the fact that God wants to use me as I am. As He has made me.  All the jealousy and bitterness and holding on to hurt in my life was building a wall between who I am and who I desire to be, and causing me to feel like a failure in my spiritual life. Why was I not making a difference? Because instead of realizing my own gifts and utilizing them for a higher purpose, I was forcing myself to look better in order to gain recognition for my talents. What I realized while I was talking to this girl was that my talents, my beauty, and all the other assets that God has given me are not "given to me". I don't own them. They are not mine to squander and use at will, as fodder for jealousy, to please myself or the world, or even as an outlet for emotions. They are God's.

Your words are God's. Your mind is God's. Your face is God's. Your music is God's. And so on and so on, for whatever your particular assets are. Fill in the blank. _____________ is God's. It belongs to him.

I told the girl that I was counseling that God, who is perfect, had made her in His image (Genesis 1:27), so He must have envisioned someone he could use for his purpose when he created her (Psalm 139:13). She felt that she had no assets, no talents, and no particular beauty to speak of. That does not determine worth. Upon salvation, God transforms your
life and that is what gives you worth! Not how great you play the piano or how well you deal with people or how attractive you are, or any of the other things that this world will tell you are important. If you have been so blessed with abilities and assets, it is your responsibility to use them for a higher purpose. And if not, well, you have to find something that you are good at and do that (1 Peter 4:10). But you are NOT useless. And neither am I.

I watched this kid show once, while I was babysitting my little cousins, about this bee who only wanted to be "very useful", because his mommy bee had complimented his sister bee on her helpfulness. "Being useful" was his only goal, so he went around trying to find jobs which he would be good at, but he kept messing them up. Like: this little bee went to help the mailman put a letter in the mailbox and accidentally caused him to spill the letters all over the place. I think that some people feel that way - they see others who have different gifts and they go around trying to find their own niche without success, eventually becoming discouraged because they do not have what others do. They don't feel "very useful". But they are comparing themselves too much. All they can see is what they don't have. But what we haven't been given shouldn't concern us. It does not matter what our shortcomings are - God still desires to use us. He desires to use us in spite of ourselves (Psalm 71:20).

The body of Christ can't function if all we focus on is ourselves, nursing jealousy, bitterness, and a prideful spirit. In order to be useful, I first have to surrender to him. I have to realize that I am not my own. This simple truth is something that I have struggled with so much. So how can we combat this winter slump?

1. REWIND YOUR LIFE

Take a moment and forget about what you don't have. Just don't think about it. Instead, focus on one thing that you think you are good at - being kind, encouraging through music, defending your faith, writing - and rewind your life. How far has God brought you with that particular talent in the last five years? Ten years? Twenty? How has God used it to change your life or to impact others lives around you?  Nothing God ever does is pointless, including giving you whatever special talent you have.

2. HAVE DEVOES

It sounds so stereotypically Christian: read your Bible, kids! It makes life better! And the truth it, it doesn't make life better, not really. It doesn't promise happiness to Christians - in fact, It says we will be mistreated (John 16:1-4). But God's Word DOES have power! Not only does a daily dose of Scripture make one feel closer to God, but it shows what God wants us to be doing with our life, whether that means taking a passage straight like it says or modeling a situation off of a Bible hero or heroine. Not to mention the impact of prayer! I have personally found that even when God says no to whatever road I wanted to walk, he will show me a more meaningful path to take. Just the other day, I prayed for our youth group retreat to be the "best ever" because it was going to be my last one. Instead of answering that prayer the way I wanted it to be answered - by giving me a super fun awesome weekend - God decided to show me some things about Himself and myself that I never knew. The weekend turned out to be very draining for me. But I have to say, it was the "best ever." Having devotions daily (including a time of prayer) by yourself, with friends, with family or with a mentor is one of the best ways to get psyched up about how you fit in to the body of Christ.


3. USE YOUR GIFTS

They say practice makes perfect. Without ever actually using your gift for God's glory, how can one expect to gain any reward? I was using my gifts, all right - but only to make myself feel good, look good, and seem, well, good. The fact is that no matter how good we look in this life, it does not matter. You can be the most famous, most beautiful singer on Broadway, or you can be the best soccer player and be the envy of every teenage boy in Britain, or you can write like Emily Bronte and Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain combined, but if your heart is not in the right place, you can't make a dent. You can't. And you won't. Using your gifts is the last step to feeling useful because if you don't take a step back and reevaluate what God has done for you, and if you don't get back into a daily habit of communion with God, your heart will most likely be stuck in that winter slump and you won't be of use to anyone, not really. A lasting impact is not something we should strive for in this life - we should strive to make an impact in the next.

So, dear friends, if you ever feel spiritually useless, remember that God does not make pointless things. Every jar has value and a purpose to him, no matter how unattractive it may seem on the outside. If we can just remember to rewind our lives to remember what God has done for us, get back into the habit of daily devotions and an active prayer life, and use our talents to bring glory to God and be a light to bring others to the knowledge of Christ, we will be able to "make a dent" in our society and in our world, not only in this life, but in the next as well.