I think God wants to help me overcome my unbelief… All signs point to this theme in my life and I work through a Beth Moore Study called “Believing God.”
These were my prayers today:
Lord I confess: I doubt that you will transform my parents’ and siblings’ understanding of and relationship with you. I doubt that you will capture the hearts of my friends in real ways. I doubt that you will bring Tommy and I closer together to each other and in our relationship with you. I doubt that you will create any real change in me.
Oh Lord I am sorry. Please, please help me overcome my unbelief! I don’t want to be this way. I grow more cynical and I am less amazed by what is truly amazing. Give me a spirit of awe, a spirit tuned into what you are doing and the incredible nature of your work. Help me to believe that you can create a change in me.
Help me overcome my unbelief. Please don’t give up on me as I muddle through this. Don’t give up if I miss signs that you are working- or if it takes me a really long time to notice your blessings. Please don’t give up if my heart is hard and cynical. Soften it and give me awe for you.
Help me overcome my unbelief.
A few days ago I identified two areas of my life that I really needed to believe that God would show up and move in. One was in my own mindset. Maybe it’s a little bit of postpartumish blues, but I think mostly it’s just my own attitude and need for adjusting; at any rate, I’m unhappy more than I’d like to admit. I am carrying a chip on my shoulder and with it a sense of entitlement. I let my mind tumble headlong down the rabbit hole of how hard I’ve got it and how much I deserve a break, how hard I’m working and how little everyone else is, how no one else can understand because no one has as difficult a life as me. And you can see, of course, how this kind of thinking lends itself so easily to selfishness and self-centeredness. And at the core of it is a general inability to recognize and be happy with the many, many blessings I’ve been given right now. So I’m asking God to change this. To change my mindset. To help me believe and see how he is working in and blessing my life. To help me believe that he can create a change in me and that I won’t be stuck in this wretched, selfish mind forever. Somewhere along the way I got cynical. I stopped seeing the awesomeness of God, I stopped being amazed by him and what he’s doing. I want that to change. I want to be amazed by God.
The second area I’m asking for belief in is in my marriage. Lately I’ve felt like Tommy and I have been disconnected. Marriage has felt like a burden and we haven’t had fun together in so long. I feel like we are not loving each other and listening to each other in ways that the other person recognizes. And I am taking out all my unhappiness on him. I need to see Tommy with new eyes, to see the things I fell in love with again and to enjoy him more.
So I am choosing to believe that in the next ten weeks of this study God will show up in these two areas. I am praying that God will help me pray with faith for these two areas and that I will be given eyes to notice and a heart that appreciates the ways he is working. And even though, quite literally, no one reads this blog, I’m going to use it as a space to document this challenge. Maybe I’ll let people in on the journey as I go, but for now it will, at the very least, be a place where I can go back to see how God worked in my life that one time I took a leap of faith and chose to believe that he could and would show up in real ways.
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