For July 6th:

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.” John 14:1

            “God and I, we’ve long had trust issues.

            …Just trust? When the farm economy is imploding and all around us farming families are losing their land or being buried in loans and debts, us all just hanging on by the skin of the teeth?...

            Anxiety has been my natural posture, my default stiffness…How I don’t fold my hands in prayer…weld them into tight fists of control. Always control…How I refuse to relinquish the worry,…Worry is the façade of taking action when prayer really is. And stressed, this pitched word that punctuates every conversation, is it really my attempt to prove how indispensible I am? Or is it more? Maybe disguising my deep fears as stress seems braver somehow.

            …Stress is only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin…I know an untroubled heart relaxes, trusts, leans assured into His ever-dependable arms. Trust, it’s the antithesis of stress….But how to learn to trust…Can trust be conjured up simply by sheer will, on command? I’ve got to get thing, what it means to trust, to gut-believe in the good touch of God toward me, because it’s true: I can’t fill with joy until I learn how to trust: :May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow” (Romans 15:13). The full life, the one spilling joy and peace, happens only as I come to trust the caress of the Lover, Lover who never burdens His children with shame or self-condemnation but keeps stroking the fears with gentle grace.

            …my daily work, the work God asks? to trust….This is the trust I lack: to know that if disaster strikes, He carries me even there…the opposite of faith is fear…

…trusting God is my most urgent need. If I deep trusted God in all the facets of my life, wouldn’t that deep heal my anxiety, my self-condemnation, my soul hole?

The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is

everything.

… How would eucharisteo (thanksgiving) help me trust? Thanks is what builds trust…Nothing has materially changed since yesterday’s fears, last week’s anxiety. But I have. I’m changing. I’m changing, deep changing, I am giving thanks, doing eucharisteo…”

Ann Voskamp, One thousand Gifts, 2009