It never ceases to amaze me how often it occurs that what I’m slated to write about in a given week or season, turns out to be exactly what I need. And this week was no different. I entered December fully surrendered to the process of waiting and being present with those right in front of me. All my holding steady quickly got upended, however, by God’s work of suddenly – our house sold! And within a few days we found a house to buy! My faith basked in the rays of so many answered prayers.
We’re in the home-stretch now. We’re ‘clear-to-close’ on both houses; the packers are coming tomorrow; and we’ll be on our way to Georgia by the end of the week. Just what we’ve been waiting for. Just what we’ve been asking God for.
And yet. The other morning I woke up to Doubt niggling my thoughts. I found myself wrestling with the uncomfortable feelings of sadness and nervousness that were jumbled with the joy and relief I’d been feeling of late. I didn’t like that I wasn’t just happy or that I would doubt God after ALL He has done and has been doing over the course of the last months. I mean, He has shown Himself in some extraordinary ways as I’ve sought His comfort and wisdom, strength and spiritual stamina. Where was this doubt coming from?
I’ve been processing my mish-mash of thoughts and emotions with God all week and have come to realize – they’re normal when life has gotten flipped upside-down. Even planned change is still change. And our bodies, minds, and spirits must wrestle before they rest. They must make sense of the chaos before fully planting themselves in the newness. They must break through self-preservation tendencies before embracing all that God has for them.
And so I sigh, impatient with myself for needing to go through such processes – which is another way of grappling with my limitations. Then I take a deep breath, seeking the Holy Spirit, and set out to unpack all that we are meant to receive today.
Here goes…
Stretching out our arms to fully embrace our faith in Jesus Christ as Savior, Lord, and Holy Friend requires an abandonment of the many burdens we insist on carrying. Our figurative appendages become overloaded with a myriad of thoughts and feelings that actually distract us from true belief.
While embracing faith has a Big-Yes-Moment, it also has a daily component full of little yeses. But, if our hands and hearts are full of clutter, we become too encumbered to embrace anything beyond what we’re already holding.
Clutter, like doubt. Or discomfort. Or limitations.
And so it goes – in order to truly and fully embrace faith, there’s a constant kind of reckoning required within our hearts and minds. An acknowledgement of what it is we hold so tightly that it now has a hold of us – so that we might, at last, release it and step into a belief of Jesus that is unburdened. It’s then that we can fully embrace faith.
Embrace Doubts
Doubts about who Jesus is or if there’s a God can keep us from initially giving our hearts to Him, but it’s significant for us to recognize doubt’s role in our day-to-day lives of faith. For instance, I’ve begun awakening to the truth that each time worry rises up in my gut, its source is distrust. I am doubting God will do what He says – protect my loved ones, redeem the prodigal, forgive the sin. I am also doubting God is who He says – good Father, faithful provider, constant companion.
Doubt keeps us from embracing faith necessary for daily life – and from believing God for every need, big and small.
We have been given brains with which to discern and decide; we’re meant to think. But sometimes our thinkers overwork. They circle around the same fears over and over. They spiral until we’ve gone from praising God to cursing His name.
Sometimes our minds simply get jammed up with all the unpopped kernels of doubt – doubt about God’s faithfulness or goodness or nearness, doubt about His plans and purposes, doubts about His will and way. Doubts, like hard kernels that refuse to move through the machine in order to make room for the good stuff, clog up our minds and keep us from the fullest faith that trusts God in every moment.
Instead of throwing more corn into the popper with the hope of overriding those kernels of doubt (ie: stuffing or ignoring our doubts), we actually need to turn off the machine and pull out each doubt, one by one. We name them. Then we discard them.
In other words, we embrace doubt long enough to acknowledge their presence and their negative effects on our faith. But we don’t cling to them or give them enough time to take root in us. Rather, we release them to the Lord and turn our thoughts to Him.
Embrace Discomforts
If we’re honest, we can admit that we are creatures of comfort. It’s why we sit in the same pews every Sunday – we’re comfortable there. It’s why we run the air conditioner at 75 in the hot summer – we’re comfortable there. It’s why we rarely leave our homes to meet our neighbors – we’re comfortable there.
It’s why we clam up when given the chance to share our faith stories or talk to a stranger who needs help or tell a friend we’re the one who needs help – because it makes us uncomfortable.
Interestingly, discomfort can either be our excuse to stay just as we are or our catalyst for change. This past summer our therapist counseled us that people will not change unless they are uncomfortable. For example, the threat of eviction pushes someone to look for a new job. Or the promise of divorce propels an unfaithful spouse into couple’s counseling.
Comforts are often benign – not bad, not poisonous, not deadly – until they are.
Jesus has said that we cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24), and similarly, we cannot serve both our desires for constant comfort and full faith. One will always win out.
Allowing ourselves to feel discomfort just might push us out of the proverbial comfort zone long enough to see ourselves more clearly. The eyes of our hearts will begin to open to the reality that our aversion to discomfort might actually be what is keeping us from the often uncomfortable reality of true faith. As such, embracing discomfort catapults us toward Jesus and a fuller faith in Him.
Embrace Limitations
I know I’m not alone when I confess that I do not like admitting to my limitations – not to myself, not to others. My recent bout of achilles tendonitis had me in an orthopedic boot for a few weeks, and I had to work hard to embrace my limitations. Stairs were not my friends, so carrying boxes down them required me to ask for help. Ugh. And when the boot came off but my limp still slowed me down, I had to release self-conferred shame in order to ride the electric cart through the mega-store. Double ugh.
Limitations are as real and varied as every human ever born, yet we consistently resist and deny them as if they were the plague – or a pandemic. Pride trips us up each time we try to evade asking for help or admitting a need.
So, when we consider how we carry this learned or inherited way of believing “I can do it” into our faith walks, we begin to realize just how often we put limits on God – all because we won’t admit to ours.1 Our faith that God can and will do anything and everything for His beloved (that’s us!) will be as hindered as our willingness to name our short-comings and inabilities.
Releasing our attempts at control, naming our overly independent “I can do it” attitudes, and embracing our limitations actually allow us to rely more on God. And that will always build our faith – because, then, when prayers get answered or purposes unfold into beautiful plans, our Good Father gets all the glory. Our hearts expand with understanding that He is unlimited – and always at work on our behalf.
Embrace Faith
All this naming and releasing and embracing – they’re hard work in the sense that we constantly remain alert and attentive to our own tendencies and the enemy’s attempts at influencing us. But it’s not work in the sense that we’re striving to prove our allegiance or achieve a faith-standard. Afterall, we recall Dallas Willard’s exhortation that “grace is opposed to earning but not to effort.”2
And our effort, as we seek to grow our faith, is poured into the practice of abiding in Christ – living hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). It’s an effort to remain in Him, to keep our hearts and minds aligned with Him. It’s an effort to keep digging through all our layers to find the sources of doubt and discouragement.
In this way, our “faith has a job. And it’s called following Jesus because” we “need faith to do it.”3
Our faith will need to exert some effort in order to embrace the fact that all the thoughts and feelings that come from difficult circumstances, long seasons of barely surviving, and big life changes are normal. We are going to doubt; we’re going to wrestle with discomfort; and we’re going to resist our limitations – those are easy. They’re no effort at all. The work begins with seeing the unpopped kernels that clog our faith – then naming them, moving through them, releasing them.
Yet it’s not our job to overcome all the ‘hard’ on our own. We are meant to lean into our Savior whose grace is always enough. As a result, we don’t hide in shame because of our thoughts. We don’t berate ourselves for our feelings. Instead, we embrace them all.
As we do, our overburdened arms will find the clutter removed and fully open to the One who takes the burdens onto Himself. And we’re once again free to embrace faith in God for all that He is.
Father God, how we need You. We need more of You and less of us! We are recognizing our tendencies to doubt You come from the broken places within us that need to be made whole. And that’s the reality for every human on the planet; it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s also nothing to get entangled with. So today, in this moment, we name one doubt that we’re carrying, and we ask that You would help us break through all the feelings and thoughts that want to keep the doubt hidden so we can finally embrace it. And give it to You. Lord Jesus, when You reached out your scarred hands to Thomas, who has been branded most ungraciously as the Doubter, You were demonstrating to us your grace. You didn’t belittle him or deny him. Rather, You gave him the chance to see for himself the truth so that he could overcome his doubt. So we ask You to extend your arms to us and envelop us in your grace that overtakes every doubt and makes room for faith. Holy Spirit, none of this is possible without You. Help us to lay down fear and pride and shame so that we can break through the walls that doubts have built around our hearts and minds. Help us to name each doubt specifically as You bring them to mind. Then empower us to lift them to our Father so they can be purified by His love – so we can fully embrace the faith in Him that will truly sustain and satisfy us. Finally, we ask that You would take us through a purifying process for each discomfort and limitation that we have deemed unworthy or unholy so that we might see them as tools and catalysts for even more surrendered faith in God. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
(John 3:30; Psalm 147:3; John 20:24-29; John 8:32; John 14:26; Romans 8:26; Malachi 3:2)
Resources: I love sharing with you the books, podcasts, articles, and anything else that has inspired, encouraged, or taught me. These are humble offerings with no expectations.
- 1 – Here’s a little more, “We all have limitations. We can fight them, resent them, be defeated by them – or, we can embrace them. But even in the acts of wrestling through and acknowledging our limits, we want to lean into God and work through them with Him; otherwise, we trap ourselves in the vicious ‘I can do it’ cycle. When we realize that ‘learning to embrace our limitations is actually worship,’ we will take an important step toward living out our full identity in Christ. We will take hold of the truth that ‘we are not God. He is!’” (The inner-quoted portions are from Gretchen Saffles’ Bible study, Redefined: A Bible Study on Identity in Christ ). [I wrote these words in my post, Hidden Identities: Secure]
- 2 – Jen Pollock Michel, in Surprised by Paradox,^ quoting Dallas Willard.
- 3 – Annie F Downs interviewed Darlene Zschech on her That Sounds Fun podcast, Episode 928. And Darlene said, “My faith has a job” multiple times. It resonated and took root. May we continue to unpack with the Lord what work our faith needs to do so that we don’t slide into striving or earning or giving up. XOXO
- Here’s a great video teaching by my friend Amanda Jarvie in New Zealand – one of the many timely moments God spoke to me about doubt and faith and all the things this last week.
- You might discover some treasured tunes from the recent past tucked into our Embrace Faith playlist — songs like “Oceans” by Hillsong. That particular song was definitely my song-of-the-year in 2013 — maybe 2014, too. In fact, I currently have a sticker on my laptop that ‘sings’ to me everyday: “Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders” — my heart’s plea. And as I read through the opening stanzas (sans music), I rediscover the power behind the words. I also notice my little word-of-the-year for 2025 hiding itself there for this moment of revelation. XOXOXO
You call me out upon the waters
The great unknown where feet may fail
And there I find You in the mystery
In oceans deep my faith will stand
And I will call upon Your Name
And keep my eyes above the waves
When oceans rise
My soul will rest in Your embrace
For I am Yours and You are mine - The Abiding Life Newsletter is one way we continue the conversations about living hidden with Christ in God — aka: abiding in Him. I recently published an edition, making it available via email (subscribe here) and on Substack.
Rhythms: As my newsletter’s title infers, we seek to develop an abiding life in this space — a place where we can get informed but also be transformed as we learn to abide in God’s presence throughout our days. I like to think that developing rhythms is what aids us in our desire and ability to become more Christlike.
Sometimes the best rhythms for growing our faith are the ones that seem the most counter-intuitive — like embracing doubts or discomforts or limitations. What doubt do you need to root out this week? What discomfort might God be asking you to embrace so that faith has room to grow? What limitation is God bringing to mind that needs to be named and embraced for your good and His glory?
- Finally, as a community, let us not neglect sharing God’s amazing grace with others! Share your God-stories with people around you. Share this site. Share God’s Word. Shine His light into the world!
Featured Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash. “All the Bits and Pieces” photo by Sahand Babali on Unsplash.
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