When We Stop Trying To Figure God Out

soulrest

Before I began writing, I was a CPA. I still have that side of my brain, the part that wants to analyze, categorize, and finalize.  I want to look at life and see the full circle.

Typically, whatever I’m experiencing, I’m looking for what God is doing in it and through it. “Oh, that’s why that happened.” “Maybe God is doing this so that….” “I think God allowed this so that…”  Basically I’m trying to figure God out all the time. I want to understand God’s work in my life.

Sometimes I see how the different pieces of my life fit together, but sometimes I don’t. I look for what He is doing in the life of my children, my husband. I look at the problems we face, and I look for the reasons, the pieces that when put together can make it all make sense.

When Steve and I were younger (we’ve been together since middle school), he was quite the jokester. He still can be that way. But I was gullible and believed anything, and he got a real kick out of seeing what he could get me to believe. Then we would laugh at my naiveté. We’ve grown up. A little.

When he wanted me to really believe him, he would say, “Just trust me.” Not once did he ever ask me to trust him when he was actually kidding. He honored that phrase and held to his word.

Because he never broke my trust when he asked me to place my trust in him, he earned my forever trust.

God asks me to trust Him every second, every minute, every hour of my life. Unlike a boy or a man, God is incapable of lying to me because God is truth. God is faithful.

At times trusting God is easy. At other times it seems near impossible. The task is too large. The problem is unsolvable. The history is too extensive. The wounds are too deep.

No matter what we face, God whispers, “Just trust me.” Just trust me.

It’s simple, right? All we have to do is trust. He does the rest. Might not look the way we planned, but He is always good and right. The pieces might not fit the way we are attempting to fit them together.

A few weeks ago, my soul seemed more restless than normal. I could sense God telling me to still my soul, to calm my anxious mind, to simply trust Him with every detail of my day.

Maybe that is how my soul gets still. When I stop trying to figure God out. When I stop trying to see how all the pieces of my life fit together in one neat, tidy picture. I can’t see what God sees. Some of my pieces fit into the lives of others I can’t see, and so do yours. On our end, we will have incomplete pictures, but from God’s view, it’s a perfectly complete picture. Beginning to end, what we can’t see.

I vowed to stop the constant figuring out of God and to begin trusting Him more. On my own power, I can’t last long. Each morning I’m asking Him to help me simply trust Him. To hold up my hands in surrender to the analyzing ways I’m prone to and go back to the days I believed anything, but this time I want to believe that with God anything is possible. Even trusting Him with every detail of my life.

Isaiah 55:8

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the LORD. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.

 

Romans 11:33-34

Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, OR WHO BECAME HIS COUNSELOR?

Max Lucado writes in Before Amen, “In our desire to understand him, we have sought to contain him. The God of the Bible cannot be contained.”

I think I’ll stop trying to figure God out now. Like a simple, once gullible girl, I’ll choose to simply trust.

Trusting Him leads to deep soul rest. Deep, deep soul rest. I can let go of the need to understand, for only He sees it all. I don’t need to understand everything. I just need to trust Him. He is God, and I am not.

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