I haven’t been writing either my books or my blogs for a while.  Life sometimes interferes with creativity.  Not necessarily bad life or good life, but busy – it gets too much and the creative side of me just says – enough!

I’ve been dealing with a lot of situations in which the people, well, their perspective is way different than mine.  They claim to be Christians, they claim to love God’s Word, but the way they come to decisions seems to shout out that they don’t trust Him enough to truly allow Him to be Lord.

Granted, I’ve been there when the bills are piling up and the customer you thought was going to renew goes under, and your knee stops working and the scale says you have to lose more weight and faster . . . life is tough.   (Still there by the way . . . “This is the song that doesn’t end, yes, it goes on and on, my friend . . . )

I once confessed to my church years ago that I might sing, “Your grace is enough,” till the cows come home, but my reality is that I put a really big BUT after that phrase and out spill all the things that haunt me:  BUT my mortgage needs to get paid, BUT my kids needs help at school, BUT my water heater just broke, BUT my credit card debt just keeps getting higher – it never ends.  The list.  My friend Louise Midwood named it the “Litany of Woe.”

I can give head assent to the fact that Jesus is my Lord, that He died and rose again, that He loves me unconditionally and that He is all I need, right up until the next crisis takes over and then I get scared.  Again.

Scripture says we should be grateful for adversity.  Grateful.  What!?

Well, for one thing, if I hadn’t gone through all the horrible adversity that I had over the last twenty years of being self-employed, and watched the Lord slowly show me that at every step, at every horrible moment, He had already planned for me a way, I wouldn’t have the strength now to choose to trust Him again.

I got shoved out of a church full of people who loved me and whom i loved dearly, only to discover – surprise! – the church I started attending instead was just where God wanted me to be.  I had to deal with whether or not we should go bankrupt, follow other financial advisors (yes, Christian ones) who told me to create a new business, bankrupt the old and move all the assets to the new business.  I chose to work through the problem, ask others to help me do the right thing and cut our pay in half to make it happen, trusting Jesus to pull us through.

At every step of the way, I had a choice.  I could choose to play it safe – God will forgive me, right? – and kind of bend the rules a little, save myself, and move on, (aka “sin that Grace may abound”)  then try to stay on the “good path” going forward OR I could choose to do the right thing, the hard thing, the “I will have to trust that God will honor this” thing and keep putting one foot in front of the other in faith that the walkway will appear at the right time.  (Raider’s shout out here!)

David (the king one from the Old Testament) didn’t just walk up to King Saul one day on his way to deliver lunch to his brothers and say, “Hey, I can take down that giant in one stone!”  No, he had worked hard every day to protect his sheep and depended on the Lord to make sure the lions and the bears didn’t get the best of him and eat his sheep.  He spent those formative years praising God for each blessing and trusting God for each difficulty.  He knew when he walked up to Goliath that the Lord God Jehovah walked before him, had brought him through every other scary circumstance up to that point, and would not fail him now.

Why are things so difficult?  We don’t like adversity.  We do everything we can to avoid it.  But this is life under the curse. 

One of the great things I love about our Lord God Creator is that He takes this curse, the result of our disobedience, and turns it into something that molds us and shapes us into the real people He knows we need to be – in Him.  That’s why bad things happen.  We brought this curse down on ourselves and no matter what we do, cursed people are going to let us down, lie to us, deliberately cheat us, and take their bag of coins and walk away.  But when we turn to Him and say, “Okay, I’m not going to do that.  I’m going to trust You to take care of this for me and I’m going to choose the hard thing, the right thing to do.” Well, God is faithful and He honors that and then your life becomes very cool – part of an adventure, the real deal.

Only my definition of grace forces me to say “But . . .” after “Your grace is enough.”  If I understand fully what God’s grace entails, then I just fling my arms open wide, turn my face towards heaven and sing it with all my heart, “Your Grace is enough!”  End of story.  The pain is still there, the bills are still there, the customers are still not keeping their word, the vendors are squeezing me for every dime, but the Lord God Almighty is standing in the gap and He has a plan, and He is never thwarted, never turned back, never too tired to keep on.  He never fails.

He is patient.  Kind.  He never fails.  He loved me before I was formed in my mother’s womb.  He knows the hairs on my head – every moment of every day.  There is no mountain He cannot move.  There is no distance He would not go to save me.  I am secure in His love because He is Love.  And that Love covers me.

I can choose the right thing.  I can face the hard thing.  I can choose not to cheat anyone, not to grey the truth to anyone, because I know it honors the Lord and the Lord loves me and sees that I do this, not because I’m all that and a bag of chips, but because I trust that He is not only that bag of chips but a whole truckload more.  He is the Chip Maker.  The real deal.

So I watch people in their interactions with me make these less than honorable choices and I wonder, how much of their faith in God did that just blow away?  How much less are they going to trust the One, the only One who can be trusted, if they aren’t willing to trust Him with this?  And I am glad that when adversity came my way in my younger days that I was given the strength to choose to trust Him at each step of the way.  I wanted to choose easier and He gave me people in my life who wouldn’t allow it!  And I learned that He is well worth trusting and I am so glad I did.

I’m on that pilgrim progress road, the thin stretch of pathway only wide enough for me to walk with Jesus and oh, how easy it is to take a step off here, just a little jog away for this, just a moment on the right or left for that and suddenly not see that path before me.  Only daily contact with Jesus keeps me choosing that straight and narrow.

And I don’t have to feel bad about choosing straight and narrow.  I don’t have to apologize for choosing Jesus.  I don’t have to worry about making the right choice, when it honors God to do so.  He will never leave me, nor forsake me.  His Grace is sufficient for me.  “I will trust in Him.  I will trust in Him.  I will trust in Him.”  I think the songwriter says it three times because we need to do that when we’re scared, so we don’t forget and make the easy choice and then have to live with that bad choice.

Yes.  I still get scared.  A lot.  But another songwriter reminds me that “I’m no longer a slave to fear.  I am a child of God.”  The scripture verse says, “I’m no longer a slave to sin.” and really – sin is what gives us that fear.  It craves fear, uses fear, multiplies fear every time you give in to it.  I choose peace of mind, as clear a conscience as this sinner can hope for, because I choose Jesus and HE is my righteousness.  I believe that.  I act on that belief with His strength and all the hard choices become easy after that.

I choose Jesus.  Do you?  Or do you just say that you do and then keep walking off the path?