To The Christian Who Has A Hard Time Trusting When Things Are Hard

Some days I just feel in my heart that I need to write a blog post, and today is one of those days. I have no idea where this post is going to go, but when my heart is aching writing always seems to make it better.

As a Christian, I know deep down that everything is a part of God's plan and that everything will work out according to His plan. But some days, it is so hard to whole heartedly believe that. Some days your heart just aches, and you wish God was there to just wrap His arms around you and hold you while you cry. The past few days have been those days where I need God's arms wrapped around me. 

The past few days have been a whirlwind of emotions, I feel like my body has not had time to process everything. I want to be completely honest, since Friday, I have slacked off on my quiet time and my prayers. I know that I need to spend time with the Lord, and that He will give me the comfort I need... but I just can't. 

Why is it when we are struggling, we tend to forget about the ultimate Comforter and the Prince of Peace? Why is it so hard to trust God's plan when things are difficult? Shouldn't those times be when we long to hear from Him and want to spend time with Him? 

In this season of my life, I am really struggling with the fact that God only places people in our life for a season... it hurts. It makes it so hard for me to trust; to trust people and to trust Him. It kills me when I finally start to trust someone and get to know them, and then they were only meant to be there for a season. It's hard but I have to be quick to look into the situation and see where God's hand was there. What was God teaching me? What did I learn? From what I learned, what can I use in the future?

1 Chronicles 16:11 says Seek the Lord and His strength; seek His face always

I love what this verse is saying, but it also cuts like a knife... sometimes it is extremely difficult to seek His face always. Sometimes we doubt God's plan, we doubt His goodness. We wonder what we are doing with our life and where we need to go next. We wish there was a hotline number that we could call, to talk to God and ask Him all of our burning questions. As our hearts are aching, we want Him to be here, right beside us. To tell us what to do. But then we read the stories in the Bible, do any of them have a bad ending? Does God ever abandon His children and leave them there to handle things on their own? No, God is ALWAYS with us, through the good and the bad. In the hard times, this is when we need to remind ourselves the most that God NEVER LEAVES OR FORSAKES US!!! In Hebrews 13:5, God clearly says "I will never leave you for forsake you."

Even in these difficult times, we have to be adamant about reminding ourselves the truth, we have to believe whole heartedly that God is good and true, His plans are far better than any plan we have for ourselves. 

Why We Need To Love The Stage Of Life We Are In

I woke up this morning... ehh afternoon* and did my usual routine: Wake up, check every social media site, make a bowl of Fruit Loops while I check social media once again. 

One of my favorite youtuber/bloggers is Abby Smith (twist me pretty)  and she had just shared a link to her new blog post. After reading her post, I was very inspired to just start typing. So here I go, I don't really have a plan of what to say but I'm just going to go for it.

2016 was a roller coaster year for me. 2016 started off to be probably the best year that I have had in a very long time. At the end of 2015, my family was dealing with so much sickness and death that we all felt emotionally drained. Before this, I had never lost someone so close to me and in the span of EXACTLY 3 months to the day, I lost two of the most important people in my life. One was to cancer and the other was of a broken heart. Even though this time was rough, I have never seen my family so close. We were so heart broken and lost that the only thing that kept us together was each other. Around this same time, I had no idea that I was meeting someone that would mean so much to me. Someone who cared for me, loved me, and encouraged me. If I had not met this someone, I probably would have not been able to handle everything as well as I did. 


Honestly, 2016 was great. I learned so much about myself, the Lord, and others. I felt like this was my year, my year to grow. The Lord had placed someone in my life that helped me learn all these things and I am so thankful for that. I had grown so much more as a person in those months and even more these past 3 months. 

Life has been pretty, lets say different. My life has done a complete 360 in three months. With school, work, family, friends, and a significant other. I was ALWAYS busy and stressed to the point that I had anxiety about it. I felt like there was not enough hours in the day to get everything done that I needed to. I felt like I was awful at dividing up my time... let's just admit it, I was the worst. 

Now, my life is a full 360 than it was, let's say, 5 months ago. 

Let me start off by saying, I feel like college is an awkward time for some. For someone like me, I have never been a partier or liked that kind of atmosphere. I would much rather sit and home with friends and play games or watch a movie. So it has been hard for me to find my place in college. I didn't join a sorority or get involved on campus and that has played a big role in my life now.

Okay back to what I was saying...

While I have been (and still am) on Christmas Break, I feel like I have learned a lot. My daily life has consisted of sleeping 10+ hours at night, waking up around 10 or 11, laying around the house until I leave for work at 2:30, work until 6, come back home and repeat. I have been pretty bored. I feel like right now in my life, I am just restless. I am wanting something more. I am wanting some kind of change but I don't know what it is. I am SICK of being home all the time. So for this new year, I told myself I am going to get more involved. I want to go out and meet new people.
I am in the process right now of finding a church home and a new church family to plug myself into. 

My point in telling you all of this is to ask, why are we always striving for more? We are always wanting something we don't have. I know all of us have scrolled through social media and wished that we had something from someone else's life. But we don't need to do that... we need to LOVE the life we have now. Every one is at a different stage in life and we are all on our own life path. We need to stop wishing we had someone else's life when we should be focused on our own. LOVE THE LIFE YOU HAVE. Enjoy every minute that you have in this stage of life because later on in life, you will wish that you enjoyed the stage you are in now. God is ALWAYS doing something in your life. We just have to seek Him and listen to Him. 
Now I'm not saying it's bad to want more from your life or to set goals for yourself. I just think that we also need to enjoy where we are when we are striving for our goals! 

Love the Lord and love the life He has given you ❤️

I hope you have had a great start to the new year, thank you so much for reading my post 

-Steph