This is part of my series Trusting God When It’s Not Okay, written while I’m still in the middle of a hard season. You can start at the beginning with Through, Not Around.
Recently I told a friend that the time between when something happens that sends me into a panic and when I get to the place of “Okay Lord, I don’t understand what’s going on, but I trust you” is getting shorter. When I looked back over this year, I can see how far I’ve come in extending trust to God more and more quickly and I wanted to share it in case it helps someone else who’s in the middle of something hard.
Things started getting difficult back in December and kept getting worse for about six months. Looking back, I was still praying, but I don’t know that I was really bringing God into any of it. I was mostly just trying to deal with the circumstances, and honestly, I was depending on a person in my life to rescue me from them. That season ended with a massive panic attack in June. Things got a little better after that, but only because I was able to get some distance from the situation, not because I had found any real peace.
Then this summer, things shifted again, and the person I’d been counting on to fix things was leaving. For weeks I was in panic almost constantly. I was trying to make decisions by looking at everything through the lens of fear, or my family, or what seemed right and logical, and none of it gave me any peace. When I finally started looking at it through God’s lens, I felt like he was saying, don’t make a decision from a place of panic. Stay where you are and see what happens. And when I did that, my anxiety went from about a 90 to about a 20. I was honestly surprised at how good I felt over the next couple of weeks, even though nothing had changed.
Then I got news that sent me right back into panic. It took about a week and a half to get back to that place of peace, and when I did, I wrote in my journal that I finally understood the verse about “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.” Nothing in my circumstances was different, but I was having a really good day, and I believed God was doing something.
The very next day, I had to make a really hard decision that affected people I care about. I spent about a week in tears, feeling guilty and scared and upset about everything. Then God met me through a conversation with a friend and a chapter I was preparing to teach, which I wrote about in Through, Not Around. Somewhere between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I found that place of peace and trust again. The panic went from a 90 down to about a 15.
Then on Thursday I found out things were worse than I realized. And that night, I processed it with God and got back to, I don’t know what’s on the other side, but I trust you.
So the gap went from months, to weeks, to a week and a half, to about a week, to the same day.
I’ll be honest, each time I’ve gotten to that place of trust, it seems like the circumstances get worse right after. There was a stretch in the middle of all this where I was actually afraid to tell God I trusted him, because it felt like every time I said it, it opened the door for the next hard thing.
What started to shift that was when I stopped believing the lie that God is never there for me. I was sitting with God, basically making my case for why he wasn’t trustworthy in this situation. I was listing all the things I’d hoped he would do, or felt like he’d promised, where it seemed like he hadn’t come through. And in the middle of all that, I felt like he brought to mind all these times he had shown up for me, and some of them were pretty amazing. What really got me was that the area I was so worried about is the area where he has been the most consistently faithful to me, over and over, my whole life. I had been too focused on my disappointments to see it.
I always tell people they need standing stone moments. After the Israelites crossed the Jordan into Canaan, God told Joshua to have them set up twelve stones from the river, so that when their children asked, “What do those stones mean to you?” they could tell them what God had done. If you don’t have any standing stones of your own yet, you can lean on the ones in the Bible until God’s faithfulness in your own life builds up enough of a track record that you can see it there. If I’m honest, it’s still hard for me to keep mine in front of me. But when I do, it really helps me reset.
Trusting God hasn’t made the hard things go away. What has changed is how long I stay stuck in the panic before I get back to him. And somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for someone else to rescue me and started trusting God enough to take the next step myself.
Maybe you know that cycle too, where you finally get to a place of peace and then the next thing knocks you right back down. I don’t think that means you’re failing. It still happens to me. But it doesn’t last as long as it used to, and I’m taking that as a sign that God is growing something in me, even though my circumstances haven’t changed yet.
Written by Kristen Davis, Ph.D., founder of DoubtLess Faith. I also walk alongside people one-on-one as a faith coach. If you’re in a hard season and would like someone to walk through it with you, you can book a session here.
