I couldn’t seem to shake off the feeling of dread and fear of what the future might hold. Reading seemed to steer my thoughts away from the worry, but sleep still eluded me. In Psalm 4, David also was distressed and cried out to God. His process of dealing with anxiety gives us a pattern when our anxious thoughts disturb our sleep.

You don’t have to wait until the stars of your life align, for your problems to vanish, or to understand the mysteries of life. You do have to keep taking your heavy burdens to the Lord. You have to be willing to let go of all you hold onto, so that He can hold it instead. Joy is available here and now and it’s birthed out of a renewed trust in God.

We cause ourselves heartache and hurt, making situations worse and bringing unnecessary pain and stress into our lives. For as much as we want power and control of our own lives, we are not equipped to be God. How can we come to trust again when we know both our proclivity to wrest control away from God and our tendency to feel like we let God down by not trusting? Friend, there is hope.

Do you want deeper, spiritual relationships? Ones that help you draw closer to God while getting closer to others? We are created for community, and when we find others who share our faith, that’s a real treasure worth exploring.

Hopelessness can be tempting. When life gets hard, I tend to measure my situation by what is missing, not by what I have.

We all have times when we are lonely, when our efforts to develop friendships falls flat. I remember a lengthy season in which I was very occupied but completely unfulfilled in friendship. I have learned to trust that God does want community for me, and that these times are temporary and can teach us some useful things about God and about ourselves.

Life can feel a lot like that path my husband and I hiked. Though beauty and blessings surround us, the challenging parts keep us from seeing and enjoying them. The busyness of life grabs our attention away from the simple moments.

As we weather all of life’s endless transitions—of shifting relationships and careers, deaths of loved ones and changes in our environment, cross-country moves and persisting through the ordinary seasons, what would it look like to trust the branch beneath our feet will hold when we land on it?

In times of transition, we struggle and second-guess our decisions for work and calling. What I (and I suspect many others) didn’t realize was that the questioning would periodically creep back into my life, even ten years after college.

Sometimes we have to wait for God. We want God to move, to act, to do. We pray about direction, about health, about emotional stability, and God is silent. There’s no answer. We have to wait, and in the waiting, we can start to feel alone, isolated, ignored.

There have been many times when I have longed for precise life directions, when I wished for explicit guidance in the face of uncertainty. While the Bible makes clear God’s moral will, it doesn’t leave us specific instructions. Instead, Jesus gives us a simple command to love God and love others, a command that can be carried out in billions of ways. Although how we live out this calling is largely up to us, we can glean some helpful principles from scripture.

It’s a whole lot easier to trust God when our future seems clear and predictable than when we’re navigating a life we didn’t expect. I have found that the more I surrender my worries daily to God, the more I trust Him, because worry and trust can’t occupy the same space within us - one always overtakes the other.

When we begin to worry about what God is doing in our lives, we grow dependent upon our personality, gifts, and resources, and that's not how it's supposed to be. God's word tells us that His thoughts are so much higher than ours, so how do we attain His thoughts?

When God asks us to trust, something in us rebels. It feels intangible and just out of reach. We want Him to leave us with our worry a little longer because at least it feels like something is being done about our problem. Have you ever considered that trust is actually God’s gift to us and not the other way around?

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time asking God for things. But I often neglect to notice the grace of God’s movement in those areas. The goodness of life and the peace of our day comes from looking for grace. But we’ve got to train ourselves to find it. Reminders from scripture and spiritual practices help us notice what He’s done.