“What is trusting God ?”

Have you ever been in a situation where you pray but nothing changes regardless of how much you’ve prayed?  It is as if God does not hear you or does not want to answer your request, as if He is deaf or blind. Usually after such moments of prayer, you surely expect something from God at a specific time (which is generally contrary to that of God), but nothing happens. So you start losing your trust in God and begin to look for solutions to your problems by yourself, telling yourself that maybe God is not able to solve the problem or maybe this kind of problem God does not take care of it and so you must deal with it yourself. I've been in such a situation, a situation where I lost my trust in God because He did not act when I wanted to see him do something and how I wanted Him to act. Basically, in my prayer I said to God “ I want this and I want you to do it this way at this particular time ”.

Being a human being, and therefore with a completely different logic from that of God, nothing happened as the plan that I had “ given ” to God (obviously!!). When nothing happened, I started to say, “ maybe He does not hear me. Maybe I need to find a solution by myself ”. In short, I started to lose my trust in God and started to put trust in myself (biggest mistake ever!)

As young people, we live in a world where we want everything to be instant and fast, we do not like to wait for no apparent reason (right??). Also we like what having an established plan in what we do, if not we're destabilised. So when we come to God, we want the same thing, we want what we ask in prayer be granted to us under our time and plan. Forgetting that God is God and we cannot, in any way, limit Him in our way of seeing things. And of course, nothing goes as planned then we stop trusting God.

Proverbs 3: 5 say, “trust God from the bottom of your heart, don’t try to figure out everything on your own”  (MSG).

Trusting God is refusing to look at or listen to what the world tells us and shows us, it is willing to take the risk to move forward without having any idea of where you are going, it is putting aside your human logic and agree to adhere to the logic of God that can sometimes make no sense (most of the time actually!), it's simply having faith.

Hebrews 11: 1 say,“ faith is the confidence that what we hope will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see” (NLT). Basically it’s saying this: “you have not received yet, but you have to have the assurance (nothing should make you doubt) that you have what you asked.

Again in the Bible, Jesus tells us in Mark 11:24  “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”  (NIV).  He said we must first believe before seeing. So you ask in prayer, you start to acting as if you have already received what you asked and after that you'll see the thing done. Humanly it makes no sense (we need to see to believe), but God is not human (luckily for us) and does not think like us. So if we say that we trust him, we must give up our way of thinking, stop listening to what our circumstances or our surroundings say, and live our lives with our eyes fixed on God.

November is our month of prayer in Church, each one of us has needs and situations where we want to see God move. Let's not limit God in our prayers according to our plan, but rather trust him no matter how long He will take to respond. In any case, one thing is certain, He loves us and His plan is far better than ours. Isaiah 55: 8 “ For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”  (NLT).

By:   El-j .