Brace Yourself

“If only you would prepare your heart and lift up your hands to him in prayer!

What do we do in preparation for a storm?  We close the windows, seek shelter and make sure our families are all accounted for.  Then we wait out the storm process until the clouds lift and it appears safe to return to whatever we were doing.  Sometimes if the storm is bad enough, repairs need to be done right away while the milder storms just remind us that we need to stay alert.  Is this not how it is concerning our spiritual walks?

I feel that when God wants to change something in us He will send a storm.  First a small one to get our attention and if the changes don’t occur then the storm gets bigger.  Now mind you these storms are not meant to harm but to heal.  God needs our foundations to be stirred sometimes so that we can awaken to a whole new process or way of thinking.  Everything we go through once we commit ourselves to Christ is meant for glorifying God and creating in us clean, pure hearts.  If we never go through the storms, then we will remain just as we are….safe but unchanged.

I welcome storms in my life because I know it will bring  me ever closer to Jesus and the way I need to live.  Storms come in many forms and intensities and so does the changing on the inside.  Sometimes there is a drastic change of character while other times just a gradual steady rain of rearranging our thought processes until they come inline with Jesus.

All in all if we never experience storms in our life, we will never know how to stretch our faith.  The stretching of our faith comes when we know God is tugging at something in our life and we have to be willing to trust that God’s ways are always better than ours.  We have to have the faith that He will see us through the storms and that we will be better for having gone through them.  We  need to stop burying our heads in the sand and waiting for the storms to pass without change.