Lost & Found

A few days ago I lost my keys. It's one of the most devastating things anyone can go through. For me, it initially felt like I lost a part of my life, a part of me. I searched through all the possible places I could think of, and found nothing. I sat down in my bed and just gave it up to God. I was tired of trying to look for them so I prayed and asked God to find them for me, and acknowledged that His timing would be perfect. Two days passed and I'm on the train heading downtown. I get a phone call from my roommate George. He told me He had just finished spending time with God and then the Holy Spirit told him to check a certain place in the house. He goes over there and sure enough, he finds my keys there.
It's experiences like that, where God answers a prayer like that, that restore my faith when it is weak, and push me to believe for bigger, greater things.

Um

I'm noticing a lot of irrational fears. Everytime I ride my bike, I think i'm goin to get pulled over, and the thing is I'm not doing anything wrong. I obey the traffic laws and what not, but I always feel like I'm going to get pulled over. Every day that I ride my bike, it seems I'm fighting this unseen force that wants me to back down, and not ride. But I love it too much, so I ride in the midst of feeling all of this pressure and anxiety. Anybody else feel like that?

Encouragement

For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened," He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love. he knew that physical pain, the loss of loved ones, failure, loneliness, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal would sap our spirits; that the day would come when faith would no longer offer any drive, reassurance, or comfort, that prayer would lack any sense of reality or progress.
Just as the sunrise of faith requires the sunset of our former unbelief, so the dawn of trust requires letting go of our craving spiritual consolations and tangible reassurances. In trembling uncertainty the disciple pleads for proofs from the Lord that their affection is returned. If it is not, they are frustrated and start to suspect that their relationship with Jesus is all over or that it never existed. But tangible reassurances, however valuable they may be, cannot create trust, sustain it, or guarantee any certainty of its presence. Jesus calls us to hand over our autonomous self in unshaken confidence. When the craving for reassurances is stifled, trust happens.