Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Worry Action Step #3 - Keep a Journal

There’s nothing that helps keep me focused on just how involved God is in the details of my life than keeping a record of what’s going on, my prayers, how they are answered, and the action steps that I fee God is directing me to take. When I feel like God just isn’t listening, or I feel like I’m out there on my own, I look back and see how very involved He is in so many different aspects of my life.


This week, as my husband and I made the hour drive to meet our son at the hospital where the ambulance had delivered him after a snowboarding accident, I was feeling one of those alone moments. It’s easy to get caught up in “Why does this stuff always happen to us?” mode, and I felt myself slipping into that trap. Satan would love nothing more than to isolate me there in Woe Is Me World. God met me through friends and caring medical staff. He met my son through a skier from Florida, ski patrol and ambulance/ER staff. He met us through good weather and roads. Although my impulse was to worry about nerve damage with a shoulder injury… because I’d been down that road with my husband… He distracted me and allowed me to push that worry aside. He put an orthopedic surgeon on call that we knew and were very comfortable with. He gave Adam amazing nurses in the hospital… the list goes on and on.


By giving God our worries through prayer, and by writing down our prayers (and the answers given) we can see the power of God at work, which makes it easier to release the next worry to Him and trust that He will take care of us. We may not always see the answer, or it may not be what we anticipated. We live in a world where bad things happen, but God is with us through the good and bad times. Just because we are traveling through a bad time, doesn’t mean that God is not with us or is not using us.


Just as David trusted that God would take care of him and his men, so did Joseph, Moses, Job, Esther, Ruth, and so many others. The Bible gives us a lot of examples of people with different worries and challenges. God included these examples to show us how they trusted Him with their worries and allowed Him to provide for their needs. God also shows us examples of people who did not trust God and chose to worry and take matters into their own hands rather than trust. Just take a look at Haman, Saul, Sara, and Jona to name a few. These stories illustrate how messed up we can get ourselves when we let worry take over and control our decisions.


If I don’t write things down, so I can go back and see results, the business of life has me just moving from crisis to crisis… worry to worry… and I miss the opportunity to see and appreciate the ways in which God is providing for me and those I pray for. He is interested in the smallest of details and is working in so many directions at once… sometimes it is a person that He brings into my life years before I “need” that person, it might be a job/change of jobs, a move, or a broken down car that delays me and keeps me from being in the wrong place at the wrong time.


When I write things down, it helps me to see the bigger picture and find links between things that are seemingly unrelated. It allows me to trust that God is at work in the big picture through every detail, ripple and intersection. It’s bigger than my mind can handle or begin to understand, but I can let go and trust that God knows the big picture and how it all fits together.


May God grant you peace in your heart and the strength to let go of your worries!




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