Holy Spirit, Help Me Trust God’s Will Again

• There comes a place in the journey of faith, doesn’t there? Where the path you’ve been walking so confidently seems to vanish right before your feet. The map you were given, the promises you clung to, the prayers [clears throat] you breathed as naturally as oxygen, suddenly feels like it was written in a language you can no longer read.
• You find yourself standing at a spiritual crossroads, but not the kind filled with light and clear signposts. This crossroads is shrouded in a mist of confusion, and the ground beneath you feels unsettled. It’s the place where a deep silent question begins to ache in the soul. Can I still trust his will? I know some of you are standing there right now.
• You can feel the weight of that question in the quiet moments. You see it in the weary reflection that looks back at you from the mirror. It’s not a question born of rebellion, but of heartish. It’s the residue of a prayer that seems to have hit the ceiling and fallen unanswered back into your lap. It’s the echo of a dream that dissolved in your hands just as you reach for it.
• It’s the hollow silence that followed a crisis where you cried out for a deliverance that came in a form you didn’t recognize or perhaps didn’t come in the way you begged for it all. And in that silence, a fracture appears. It’s not a fracture in your belief that God exists. Oh no, you know he is there.
• The fracture is in your trust in his will, his good, acceptable, and perfect will. Because from where you’re standing, what has unfolded [clears throat] doesn’t look good. It doesn’t feel acceptable. And it certainly doesn’t mirror any perfection. And you understood. You followed. You obeyed. You laid your Isaac on the altar and the fire fell.
• But it consumed the very thing you offered up. Or so it seems. And now the very words God’s will can trigger a flinch in your spirit. A protective drawing back. To trust again feels like being asked to place your hand back on a hot stove. The memory of the last burn is too vivid, too real. You find yourself in a crisis of trust. And a crisis, beloved, is simply a turning point.