“This is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days. I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” Jeremiah 31:33
It is interesting, as someone who would proclaim their self to be life-long Christian, accepter of God as my father and Jesus as my savior, that I would find myself at this place in my life, where I am just now realizing after 35 years of faith, I never sat down with the Bible to try and learn about and truly know God. We always hear that if you believe in God and accept Jesus, ask for forgiveness and try to be mostly good, we will go to Heaven. In essence, I think that is true, based on the Gospels (Matthew 27, Luke 23 and Mark 15) accounting of how Jesus tells the thief on the cross at his side that for his acceptance of Jesus that night, the thief will enter into heaven that night with Jesus upon their earthly deaths. Though, through my studies of Peter’s letters near the end of the Bible, there definitely is more to walking in harmony with God during our time on Earth.
Throughout the challenges of my life, being raised in an abusive and broken home, leaving my family to find my own way at 18, it was not until the last 2 years of struggle that I recognized the call to reflect on myself. In just 2 year’s time, I have dealt with moving from Tennessee to South Carolina and back to Tennessee, a 3 month separation with my husband as he had to move ahead to SC for work while I stayed behind to wrap things up and work in TN until I found a job, preparing/selling/and buying 2 homes (in a ridiculous economy), having to fully renovate our new home to make it livable while managing that with a contractor and living 6 hours away, sudden illness that resulted in surgery shortly after our move to SC, changing from a job I loved to a job I was not cut out for – to working part time – to transitioning to working fully online, pregnancy, miscarriage of my identical twins, a cancer scare, a second pregnancy, having to terminate the pregnancy due to ectopic implantation, loss of my grandpa, loss of my aunt, sudden losses of my mother and Jeff’s aunt, and gaining back 45 of the 50 pounds I spent losing the 2 years prior.
Bible frequently explains that it is times of trial that break us down, bring us to our knees, and force us to seek Him. And, Oh does God have promises for being with us during these hard times! Here are some of my favorites:
- Isaiah 43:1-3 Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
- Psalms 34:17 When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears, and rescues them from all their troubles.
- 1 Chronicles 16:11 Seek the LORD and his strength; seek his presence continually!
- Exodus 33:14 My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.
- Philippians 4:6 Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
These versus provide encouragement, absolutely. However, I still found myself spinning from my confounding anxiety and despair and frustration. I’ve felt some bitterness about my losses, guilt about the blame I often placed on my mom’s shoulders about my childhood and all the great memories of her that came back when she died that I could never share with her. I’ve felt shame for blaming God for my ectopic pregnancy. I’ve turned to food as an addition to fill voids in my life and to obsessions and entertainment to distract myself from the truths I had been ignoring for 35 years: that: God is ALWAYS good. God will ALWAYS meet my genuine needs, God will ALWAYS forgive my sins, God is ALWAYS up to good in my life, God ALWAYS loves me, God ALWAYS gives me grace.
By fall of 2021, I had felt so out of touch with my emotions. I was quick to anxiety and anger. My ears were ringing and my heart was constantly feeling as though it would explode from my chest from all the noise I was letting into my life. I realized it was time to talk to someone, and found a faith based counselor online who focuses on childhood trauma/abuse and fertility issues, among other things. In our first meeting, it was evident that she clearly understood the trials I faced, and she was able to recommend an online workshop for me from the Keystone Bible Church called “Quieting a Noisy Soul.” A apt title to describing my feelings exactly. Frankly, I was becoming dizzy by every direction I was torn, and recognized I could not hear God through it all. If you are interested, you can find the workshop audio files and printable worksheets with these links:
- The workshop – https://podpoint.com/keystone-bible-church/series/quieting-a-noisy-soul
- The handouts – https://www.keystonebible.org/quieting-a-noisy-soul-materials/
After working through the first 2 sessions, it was eye opening to realize all the lies I had let myself believe about God. I think it is important to note that I had also been wrapping up reading Hebrews through my Thrive devotional Bible, where Peter appeals to Jews who were holding back in accepting Jesus as their savior and clinging to ancient traditions and rules of how we could come to know and have a relationship with God. He describes many instances throughout the Bible where God is gratuitous and faithful to his people, and gives evidence of God’s new covenant to those who accept Jesus as the one who washed away our sin. I would highly encourage anyone who is struggling to break preconceived notions about God and what it means that He is faithful to read those 13 short chapters of Hebrews in the Bible.
In the first session of the Quieting a Noisy Soul workshop, they discuss the types of things that lead to noise in our soul and then explain that a noisy soul is deafening. It makes it hard to find peace and joy and to hear God’s plan for us. What was gratifying to me, is that for so long, I felt alone, as though I was a broken Christian, unable to find peace like “everyone else” who believed. However, in this workshop full of people, everyone identified with me, feeling overwhelmed with the noise! The sounds of anxiety and fear, discouragement and despair, anger and frustration, bitterness and hatred, lust and greed, guilt and shame, possessions and positions, obsessions and addictions, entertainment and recreation – I am not alone in the struggle to combat the noise and find a calm center where I can focus on the peace and joy that surrounds me! That is, after all, the whole purpose of my Going Home Steadily adventure – to Find Joy!
The training directed us to a model in Psalms 131: 1 & 2, where David exclaims to the Lord “Lord, my heart is not proud’ my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with matters too great or too awesome for me to grasp. Instead, I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk. Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me.” Such great information can be gathered from these 2 verses. David identifies that having eyes for things we do not have, a mind that craves to understand that which is beyond our understanding, and being proud are the root of unsettled souls. Whatsmore, letting go of those things will calm us.
The second session focused on truth, which really resonated with me and the questions that have been asked of me by friends and family who do not walk in the faith. Because I do not truly have a grasp of the Bible, though I have been taking strides to work on that over the last few months, I have struggled to answer those questions. By defining truth – that which corresponds to reality, and understanding that something cannot be both true and untrue, then one can definitively say that God is either real or he is not real. Belief is defined as what we *accept* to be true, and it is possible for us to accept an untruth, which often means we deny a truth and replace it with a lie. This means that when you look at someone who believes in God and someone who believes God is not real, one of them must be “right” and one must be “wrong.” It is not possible for them to both be right, because God cannot be real for me and not real for someone else.
There are 2 key ideas often used by those who do not believe in God: “I just never knew God”/”I never learned about that growing up.” and “God is a fantasy, like a fable or fictional story, and believing in God is a blind process.” Several sections of the Bible have recently resonated with me as a response to those beliefs, however. In Romans 1:19-21 we see that “they know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature. So, they have no excuse for not knowing God. Yes, they knew God, but they would not worship him as God or give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused.” Then in verse 25 – “They traded the truth about God for a lie.” The passage goes on to describe the things people do that go against the truth of God and how they create their own inner turmoil. In essence, in rejecting the signs of God and the truth of God, we create confusion and more suffering for ourselves by not accepting the guidance, grace, promises, and peace God has granted us through his son, Jesus Christ who lived and died for our sins (See John 3:16).
Furthermore, in Jeremiah 31: 33-34, God promises “This is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days. I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already,” says the Lord. “And I will forgive them their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.” Here, we see that each of us is born knowing God, because he has written himself into our hearts. There is no need, necessarily, to teach others that God is real, because through our consciences and our hearts, we know him from the beginning of time. The passage from Romans makes it clear that we choose to ignore this truth overtime, which makes it harder for us to recognize God’s work in our lives.
By understanding these passages, we see that whether we are raised learning about God or not, whether we have faith, our faith waivers or have outright rejected it, God never rejects us. He has already left His mark on our hearts. We already know God. It is never too late to cry out to God, as we are taught to in Psalms 51:10 “Create in me a clean heart, O’ God and renew a loyal spirit within me!” What struck me in this verse is that it does not tell us to ask for God to enter our hearts, but to clean and renew our heart and spirit, further supporting that God has been in our hearts all along. All we need is to push back the noise and the untruths that keep us from fully submitting to Him.
In 2 Peter 1: 2 – 3 we see that “Grace and peace be multiplied to [us] in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him, who called us by His own glory and excellence.” The more we learn of God and work to know of Him through the teachings of the Bible, the more we will know God’s grace and mercy for us, the more we can have grace and mercy for ourselves and for others, and the more we can work toward a place peace where we are calm and quiet, like a baby weaned from its mother.
And, it is never too late. Romans 8:35 – 39 assures us of this:
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, distress, or persecution, or famine or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written: ‘For your sake, we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things overwhelming victory is ours through Christ who loves us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither fears for today nor the worries of tomorrow, nor any powers of hell nor of the sky above or the earth below, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I pray the best for you and your journey to finding peace and joy and as you develop your relationship with the Lord.
