I had a silent sort of suffering happening for the past week and I found myself in a very broken and depressing place. My biggest battle was doubt and being able to trust God the way that I did before. It was horrible because it was like there was something blocking my ability to trust Jesus. Not being able to trust Him was hindering the faith of my prayers. 

For days I had prayed about it and kept asking Holy Spirit to open up where the problem was. Then I had to see someone who had hurt me more than anyone with the worst betrayal I could have imagined. Even though I spent years forgiving this person and healing from the pain, the Lord used it as an example. 

As I stood looking at him, I thought to myself, “there is no way I could ever trust this person again”. Then the Lord used these thoughts and revealed to me the unhealed place that I had in trusting in Jesus once again. I had forgotten how far He had taken me and who He was as my best friend. 

I was looking to God through the cracked lens of the trauma that I had to face. I was seeing Him in comparison to the family that turned their back on me. I was worried that He would leave me as a few of those in the Christ family who ended up lacking love, mercy, and kindness. I saw through the pain of these past few years when the fears that I had to walk through nearly took my life in suicide. My heart was afraid to trust that God would keep His promise to me because of all of the pain of before. 

Then Holy Spirit started to minister to my heart that I cannot judge my ability to trust Him according to the painful way that others treated me before. I could not continue to see His loving-kindness through the anguish that I had to encounter before. It was a choice of fear and not faith to assume that the bad that happened before was going to happen again. 

Even though so much support had stopped, He had been saying that there is more. But I did not trust His words because I had my heart closed to Him in bitterness from afflictions. Jesus showed me that if we don’t heal from the trauma that we have faced, it is possible to become that trauma, like a child who was burned in a fire and became consumed with the fear of the flame. 

Instead of praying by faith, I was in a position of flinching from fear and weeping from pain. Jesus then showed me that to believe is to trust and to trust is a choice to be made. We can move in the direction of fear or we can rest in the soothing stream of faith. It is important to move on from the hurt and to trust God to be good and intentional with His love. 

We have to trust that His plans are always for our good with the best intentions. It is a choice to surrender into His love and promises. Everything has a choice. A choice to trust. A choice of a blessing or a curse. 

He will meet us at the place of our trusting expectation. I love how A.W. Tozer stated, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

Now the Lord is saying that if we will surrender into trusting Him and choosing to think thoughts of faith, that He will surprise us with so much more than we can dare to believe. 

Simon was struggling to trust at first when Jesus said to go back out and cast his fishing nets again because he was processing the word through his difficult past memories. Yet Simon made the choice to trust Jesus, despite all that he had experienced and surrender into the words that Jesus gave. 

Master, we’ve been fishing all night, and we haven’t caught even a minnow. But . . . all right, I’ll do it if You say so. Luke 5:5

Like Simon, we need to move into the deeper waters of trust to find the biggest catch: Move out into deeper water, and drop your nets to see what you’ll catch. Luke 5:4

To their surprise….the choice to trust Jesus brought the manifestation of their heart desires! 

Simon then gets his fellow fishermen to help him let down their nets, and to their surprise, the water is bubbling with thrashing fish—a huge school. The strands of their nets start snapping under the weight of the catch. Luke 5:6

The invitation is to take everything that once hurt us and nail it to the cross. Take every pain and heartache and nail it to the cross. Then let go of every anxiety and surrender into His love. If we will choose today to trust Him and lift up our faith with the choice to trust, then unexpectedly and suddenly…He will surprise us with better than imagined. 

Thank you for walking with me! 

Love,  

Dannette 

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